SANTA CLARA, Cuba - Among the announcements for baptisms and marriage counseling attached to the bulletin board inside La Pastora parish is a curious two-page document. It contains every word of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
``This is right on the edge,'' said the parish priest, Rev. Patrick Sullivan, who recalls that when he read the UN-endorsed declaration aloud at a recent church meeting, many Cubans in attendance broke out laughing at principles that appear to be so at odds with their daily lives.
Father Sullivan himself seems to be living on the edge. The Bronx native is the first American Catholic priest to work in Cuba since the early 1960s, when Fidel Castro's revolution began to turn against United States and the Roman Catholic church.
With relations between the church and state softening in recent years, the Cuban government granted Father Sullivan, 50, a visa in 1993. Few Americans experience the intimacy with daily life in Cuba as well as he does and perhaps that is why his views conform to neither of the ideological extremes that define the Cuba debate.
He speaks out strongly against the US embargo on Cuba, calling it an ``unjust and destructive set of laws'' that has denied medicine to the sick. While less direct in his criticism of Castro's government, he notes a lack of ``respect for all political views.''
Since Father Sullivan's arrival, the parish has brought a democratic style to this corner of a country where there are an estimated 2,000 to 5,000 political prisoners, helping to plant what he called ``seeds that tend to grow toward democracy.'' The parish elects its own decision-making council by secret ballot and publishes a newspaper run by a former political prisoner. It even convened its own ``Commission on Justice and Peace'' until the church hierarchy in Havana, apparently feeling Father Sullivan had gone too far, told him to stop.
However, he said his presence in Santa Clara, a city of 220,000 where the streets are choked with bicycles rather than cars because of the country's severe economic crisis, is ``an indirect sign of hope for reconciliation'' between the United States and Cuba. ``It's a sign that people can be together even if their governments have screwed it up,'' he said.
``He has made us more democratic, in the truest sense of the word,'' said Angel Cristobal Garcia, who edits the parish newspaper, called United Family.
The unusual latitude given Father Sullivan relative to other Americans - a US diplomat was expelled last month for aiding political dissidents - reflects not only changes in the relationship between the government and the church, but also the development of the church in recent years as a place where Cubans feel safer voicing political dissent.
Although Catholicism never was as strong in Cuba as in other Latin American countries, the Catholic church, along with other religious institutions, suffered government-led persecution after 1961, when Castro, who had been baptized, educated and married within the Catholic Church, declared publicly for the first time that the revolution was Marxist-Leninist.
The government then shut down religious intitutions. Church property was confiscated and vandalized. Openly religious Cubans were denied jobs and membership in the Communist Party. At one point in the 1960s, some priests were sent to ``re-education camps'' along with prostitutes, criminals and other ``antisocial elements,'' according to local historians of the church.
Relations have thawed considerably in recent years, leading to a resurgence of religious activity and greater power for both the church and the Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the archbishop of Havana and Cuba's first cardinal in more than three decades. This month, a representative of the Vatican is scheduled to visit Cuba, and there is now widespread speculation that Castro is pushing for Pope John Paul II to visit Cuba sometime next year.
``The atmosphere between the church and the state, I don't know if the exact word is `friendly,' said Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, the church's vicar general in Havana, who met with Castro along with the papal representative based in Cuba at an embassy reception last month. ``But at least it's not hostile.''
The church's greater autonomy appears to offer political breathing space at a time when Cuban authorities have cracked down on dissidents. Last March, the Cuban Bishops Conference criticized the government for shooting down two small planes belonging to a Miami exile group and for arresting the leaders of a dissident organization called Concilio Cubano.
``The church gives you some protection,'' said Elizardo Sanchez, one of Cuba's leading dissidents. Although the church has attempted to distance itself from politics, it is still regarded as one of the most political organizations in the country. ``There are two political parties here,'' said one religious scholar. ``The Communist Party, led by Fidel Castro, and the Catholic Church, led by Jaime Ortega.''
``I'm sure there are some people who come to Mass who are more interested in what is going to be said before and after than they are about coming to pray,'' Father Sullivan said. The church ``is sort of a space for people to speak more freely and express themselves.''
When he was notified that he had been allowed to come to Cuba, Father Sullivan said he was as surprised as anyone. Thin and reserved, a member of the Capuchin branch of the Franciscan order, he had worked for 20 years in Central America, including four years in Nicaragua under the leftist Sandinista government. ``I got along with everyone there,'' he said. ``The government wasn't mad at me, the country wasn't mad at me.'' The Cuban government ``probably thought of me as pretty harmless.''
With copies of ``A Guide to the New Testament World'' and ``Contesting Castro'' resting on his bedstand, Father Sullivan describes Cuba in complex terms, a country where he saw more people contemplate or commit suicide in one year ``than in my 20 years in other countries,'' a tropical island where it is difficult to find a pineapple or a mango, and where medical care is so competent that he felt comfortable undergoing a hernia operation here last month.
Father Sullivan recently celebrated his 25th year in the priesthood. He said he had come to Cuba with no preconceptions. However, after working in a city where people come to the parish door seeking medicine and food, he said he began to see the US embargo as Draconian legislation that ``weighs heaviest on the weakest.''
The embargo prohibits the sale of all products, technology and services to Cuba, including medical supplies. Humanitarian shipments, including some in the past organized by Cardinal Bernard F. Law must obtain special licenses from the Treasury Department.
``My sense is that most Americans don't know how it works; if they did I'm sure the average person would not be pleased,'' Father Sullivan said. ``I'm sure, if they were asked, 99 percent of the people would say it's not right to deny pacemakers to heart patients who need them. They would say, `No, of course you don't use sick people for political purposes.'''
But he added: ``It's pretty clear to me you can't blame everything on the embargo. There's just too many things going wrong.''
He has worked to make the parish more democratic. One of the most dramatic changes was the so-called Parish Council, a 14-member body. Rather than appointing members, Father Sullivan suggested electing them to three-year terms by casting secret ballots.
``People loved it,'' he said.
He also serves as an adviser on United Family, the parish newspaper launched last year. The paper's editor, Cristobal, said he had been expelled from a Havana university in 1984, jailed briefly and forbidden from writing after being charged with religious proselytizing.
So far, according to Cristobal, the paper has not been bothered by authorities. But it still is forced to ``go by the temperature'' in determining what it can and cannot publish. Each article, the eight-page newspaper declares, ``expresses the opinion of its author.''
The changes have made Father Sullivan extremely popular in the parish. ``To have the first North American priest, we feel selected,'' said Roberto Martinez Montecino, a physical therapist and member of the parish council. ``And I think our church is the best organized in Santa Clara. Why? Because of the way he has organized the parish through his example.''
Asked if they were concerned that the activities would attract the attention of authorities, members of the parish said they were the ones responsible for the changes. But they said they were concerned that the government would blame Father Sullivan.
``The worry we have is not for us,'' said Mariano Moreno, a physics professor. ``It's for him.''
This story ran on page a1 of the Boston Globe on 10/03/96.