ROME -- As Pope John Paul II prepared for today's historic meeting with Cuban President Fidel Castro, the pope's view of Castro and Cuba and the role of the Roman Catholic church on the island is a major topic of conjecture among Cuban officials and opponents.
Does the pope believe Cuba suffers under the same system as his native Poland, and will he criticize its faults with equal vigor? Or does he see it as somehow less wicked, Marxist but reformed and espousing some ideals close to his own Christian ethics?
A Rome journalist's jab at Italy's badly divided communists said a lot about how Castro and the pope might get along.
Castro will be disappointed, columnist Curzio Maltese wrote in the daily La Repubblica, meeting with reformed communists who act like capitalists and hard-liners still awaiting Moscow's orders. ``Only with the Polish compañero will he be able to agree on the horrors of capitalism, the egoism of rich countries, the Cuban children made hungry by the U.S. imperialist embargo.''
While John Paul's anti-communist stance is legendary, he has recently stepped up his attacks on ``wild capitalism'' as selfish and dehumanizing and has condemned trade embargoes against Cuba and Iraq.
With communism gone from Eastern Europe, he wrote to the Cuban church in February, ``will the world fall under the blind control of a pitiless economic organization that does not take into account the weakest and . . . the poor?''
``He seems to be seeking `socialism with a human face,' '' said Maria Cristina Herrera, Miami church activist and founder of the Institute for Cuban Studies at Florida International University.
Said one Vatican official: ``The process of understanding Cuba is different because the government claims to have a genuine interest in improving health and education . . . and Castro has a popularity far higher than [the late Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev ever had.''
Somewhere in the Vatican, trusted aides may have already begun writing the speeches the pontiff may deliver if he visits Cuba next year.
Between the lines
It is only from the sum of those speeches that a fully nuanced picture of the pope's views on Cuba will emerge, say Vatican officials and analysts familiar with the island. But his record on Eastern European communism is clear.
John Paul has always believed that communism runs against the basic concepts of the church and that Western intellectuals were naive about its evils, said a recent biography by journalists Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi.
As archbishop of Krakow in the 1960s, John Paul met often with Christian dissidents and urged an end to government censorship on the church, said the book, titled His Holiness.
Once elected pope in 1978, he urged church leaders to highlight the incompatible aspects of Catholic and Marxist dogma and elevated Nicaragua's strongly anti-communist Miguel Obando y Bravo to the rank of cardinal.
During his first papal trip to Poland he embraced Solidarity's demands for labor rights, criticized human rights abuses and pointedly refused to praise the government's successes in rebuilding the country after World War II.
He secretly sent donations to the illegal Solidarity underground, and winked at CIA covert operations that delivered $50 million in cash and equipment such as copiers and fax machines, the Bernstein-Politi book reported.
Yet John Paul seldom confronted the Polish government directly and rejects any credit for the eventual collapse of communism.
A `rotten' tree
``I didn't cause this to happen. The tree was already rotten,'' the pontiff has said. ``I just gave it a good shake and the rotten apples fell.''
The Politi-Bernstein book gives him far more credit:
``John Paul never uttered a word that might lead directly to a confrontation between church and state . . . but everything he said marked the beginning of a grand turnabout'' for churches in Eastern Europe.
``Through him the church was laying claim to a new role, no longer only asking for space for itself [but] demanding respect for human rights as well as for Christian values. . . . These demands represented a direct assault on the universal pretensions of Marxist ideology.''
That's the pope that Castro opponents would no doubt like to see visit Cuba.
``His presence there, his strong words, can only help us overcome this Castro tragedy,'' said Miami activist German Miret, who was in Rome this week to press the anti-Castro cause.
But does John Paul see Cuba as another Poland? Or would he agree with Cardinal Silvio Oddi, a notoriously vocal 86-year-old conservative who last week said that ``deep down, Castro is not such a beast.''
Rosary and revolution
``He wrote letters to the three kings as a child, fought a revolution with a rosary around his neck and once carried a statue of Jesus,'' said Oddi, who represented Pope John XXIII on a 1961 diplomatic mission to Cuba.
For John Paul, and for many Vatican officials who deal with the issue of Cuba, the Caribbean island is no doubt very different.
The pontiff does not have the deep personal ties to Cuba that he has to Poland, sees the island as a victim of the U.S. trade embargo and the Helms-Burton law and may even dislike the United States itself.
``He has a really deep antagonism to the West, certainly toward the United States. I think he feels we're too materialistic, we're too loud, we talk too much,'' the Rev. Vincent O'Keefe, a former Jesuit vicar general, was quoted as saying in His Holiness.
And Castro ``remains very popular -- perhaps enough to win [open] elections,'' said one Vatican official. ``It's very hard for Europe to understand why the Cuban situation is so highly emotional, especially in Miami.''
John Paul also has noted that the oppression of the church in Cuba was not as harsh as in Eastern Europe and that in any case, the island's government has already begun some welcome, if partial, reforms.
``The period of the misnamed `scientific' atheism appears to have been overcome,'' the pope said in his Feb. 26 letter to the Cuban church. ``And among the people and in official circles, there's growing recognition of the assistance that Christian faith can provide to social welfare.''
He urged social peace through ``understanding and dialogue,'' and argued that the church has a right to ``stir the conscience'' of Cuba's political and economic leaders.
Nowhere did the letter mention human rights or the church's prophetic role -- church code for its duty to denounce evil.
So what does the pope really want for Cuba?
``A space of freedom for the church to carry out its pastoral mission, as well as its social doctrine,'' said a Vatican veteran on Cuba. ``A genuine dialogue involving all sectors of society and not a violent change.''
Copyright © 1996 The Miami Herald