Excerpts from the greeting of the Rev. Pedro Meurice Estiu, the archbishop of Santiago:

``This is a people that yearns to open up to the world . . . but it is ever more blockaded by foreign interests and suffers from a culture of egoism as a result of the tough moral and economic crisis that we suffer.

``Our people are respectful of authority, and want order, but they need to learn to demystify false messiahs.

``I also offer [this Mass] to the growing number of Cubans who have confused fatherland with a [political] party, the nation with the historical process we have lived in recent decades, culture with an ideology. There are Cubans who, rejecting it all wholesale, feel uprooted, reject what is from here and overvalue all that is foreign. Some think this is one of the most profound causes of internal and external exile.

``The [Cuban] church was decimated at the beginning of the 19th Century and spent the better part of this century trying to recover until, in the 1950s, it found its maximum splendor and Cubanness.

``Later, [as a] result of the ideological confrontation with state-imposed Marxism-Leninism, it returned to being impoverished in pastoral agents and means, but not in spiritual movement.''
SOURCE: Associated Press