By JUAN O. TAMAYO and APRIL WITT
Herald Staff Writers
One day last spring, the Rev. Thomas Wenski boarded a twin-engine commuter plane loaded with $100,000 worth of insulin and flew to Havana to deliver the gift to diabetic children in Cuba.
The trip should have been a triumph for the Miami Catholic priest, who has devoted his life to helping the poor and is head of the archdiocesan social welfare agency. But he kept it secret, worried that publicity might cause Cuba's government to torpedo future trips or anger Cuban exiles.
In Cuba as in Miami, politics and charity are so inextricably bound that doing the Lord's work on the island, Wenski said, often means ``walking on eggshells.''
Since Hurricane Lili's rampage through Cuba, U.S. and Cuban church officials have begun talking more openly -- but still with much anxiety -- about aid programs that both they and the Cuban government long tried to keep out of the limelight.
The Cuban church insists its only interest is helping Cubans. But Cuban government officials clearly fear the image of a ``charity case'' -- and suspect that church assistance programs might ultimately subvert government powers.
Foreign aid is indeed giving the church earthly power -- to run programs on everything from disaster relief to democracy and agriculture -- and slowly pushing it into areas where clashes with the Communist Party-ruled government are more likely. The outcome could be more freedom for Cubans -- or renewed repression of the church -- which is why Catholic activists are treading so carefully.
``We are not political. But if I can help the people, it makes it easier for them to listen to our message, and harder for the government to ignore us,'' said a Spanish-born priest in Havana who runs a free breakfast program for parish school children.
Scores of church aid programs are now operating across the island, some financed by Caritas Cuba, the local church's charitable arm, and others by individual parishes or priests with donations from foreign friends or exiled relatives of parishioners.
Many big-city parishes run free lunch programs for the elderly, usually with the knowledge -- though not written approval -- of municipal officials. One church in Havana has been feeding nearly 80 elderly each weekday. Another in Santiago feeds 250.
``A local official comes by, looks at our kitchen and says nothing,'' said a European priest who runs a meal program in Havana. ``We don't ask if we're legal, and he doesn't tell us we're not.''
Many parishes also are paying doctors to visit ailing parishioners in their spare time, although physicians legally cannot work outside the island's all-public health system.
Most large dioceses operate pharmaceutical dispensaries where Cubans can obtain, at no cost, foreign-donated medicines that are impossible to find in public hospitals and exorbitant on the black market.
Jesuits in Cienfuegos teach weekly classes on civil rights, and the diocese in Pinar del Rio has run 1,800 people through 10-week courses on Christian ethics that include discussions on everything from democracy to market economies.
``We are working to reduce the depersonalization the Cuban people suffer,'' said Dagoberto Valdez, an agronomist who heads Pinar del Rio's Center for Civic and Religious Information. ``We don't say we're undermining socialism. We say we're preparing people for living in a more democratic society.
There are also 16 priests and seven nuns assigned to prison missions, quietly visiting several dozen political and common prisoners despite government obstructions.
Caritas Cuba, which will be handling the aid sent from Miami through Catholic Relief Services to Lili's victims, has received $10 million from U.S. churches since 1993 -- and $20 million from other humanitarian agencies around the world.
One of its projects now reaches about 16,000 elderly people around the island, sending volunteers to wash their clothes, clean their homes and deliver monthly bags of food.
It also is working to launch projects that will teach people how to establish income-producing shops and diversify agriculture.
Yet even church officials involved in such government-sanctioned aid programs are concerned that too much publicity might upset Cuban officials.
``There's more space now than five or 10 years ago, when [charity] programs were shoved into the shadows,'' said Christopher Gilson, Cuban program chief for Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services. ``But there's definitely that concern . . . that it would not help at all to be publicizing those kinds of activities.''
Cuba's government has been similarly reticent, and the island's domestic media have yet to report on the work of Caritas. Clearly, the church's humanitarian work embarrasses leaders of a nation that once boasted of one of the most comprehensive social welfare systems in the world.
The Cuban church asked to establish Caritas as far back as the 1960s, but the government of President Fidel Castro demurred until the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 plunged Cuba into an economic crisis. Then the government relented, Wenski said, ``more out of necessity than any change of heart.''
Cuban church leaders also say both church and government officials have found it difficult to bridge the vast gap between Christian and communist ideologies. ``This is no bed of roses,'' said Caritas Cuba Director Rolando Suarez.
More important, Havana also remains wary of the church's power, despite five years of slowly improving relations that have brought Castro and Pope John Paul II to the brink of a meeting in Rome next month and possibly a papal visit to Cuba next year.
While the church denies any purely political role, its ethical and moral doctrines on issues such as human rights put it on an inevitable collision course with communism.
This, after all, is a pope who actively subverted the communist regime in his native Poland, and who appointed Nicaragua's strongly anti-communist Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo and Cuba's first cardinal in decades, Jaime Ortega.
Church officials tell of a Vatican meeting last fall between Ortega and European and Vatican church officials to decide how to best distribute foreign church donations to Cuba.
But a papal representative favored training lay members to strengthen non-government activities, known as civil society. When one wary bishop described it as training democracy ``cadres'' -- Marxist jargon for elite activists -- the papal envoy said simply: ``Yes.''
Most of Cuba's Catholic leaders see their church as far too weak to take on such an activist role, after being repressed or undermined for three decades by an atheist government and challenged by Afro-Cuban religions and evangelical movements.
Many of its foreign-born priests were expelled and all church-run schools were closed in the 1960s. No new church has been built since 1959.
While the Vatican claims four million Catholics out of 11 million Cubans, local church officials say the number of church-goers is far lower. In a 1994 Miami Herald poll, 20 percent of those interviewed said they attended religious services at least once a month.
Cuban church officials say their top mission in these days of relative openness is ``evangelical'' -- teaching Cubans who have little knowledge of the church's full breadth of religious as well as social doctrine.
The most the church can do, leaders say, is to slowly and cautiously ``push the fences'' of its activity into previously denied areas, such as social work, while avoiding direct political clashes with the government.
But they have never gone as far as Obando y Bravo, who likened the leftist Sandinistas to vipers last week. A Cuban branch of the Vatican human rights agency, the Commission for Peace and Justice, has done little since it was founded two years ago. And the Rev. Jose Conrado Rodriguez, a provincial priest famed for sending Castro a bitingly critical letter last year, was sent to study in Spain earlier this year.
``Our church is in a precarious position, and if it moves too fast, it invites destruction,'' said Jesus Yanes, a Havana dissident who heads a Christian Democratic political movement.
But some Cuban Catholics abroad, and a handful inside, believe the church is stronger than its leaders realize and lacks only confidence to play a pivotal role in Cuba's future.
``It is the second-largest institution besides the government,'' a church expert in Havana said. ``It has nationwide presence, highly educated personnel, a rich and politically savvy father in Rome, and even an embassy in Havana,'' he added, referring to the Vatican mission.
Church attendance is on the rise, baptisms across the island rose from 27,410 in 1986 to 70,081 in 1995, church weddings are in vogue, and ailing elderly people, even Communist Party members, are once again asking priests for last rites.
There are now 500 priests, brothers and nuns in Cuba, up 20 percent from just four years ago. And the government has relaxed visa procedures for new missionaries, recently allowing in even one U.S. priest.
Government officials claim that attendance at Mass is up because of the food and medicines priests are handing out. But many Cubans also say the church today is for them a peaceful shelter from the political and social stresses of daily life.
``I saw a space I had not seen before, a space to speak without conflict, without confrontation,'' said Victor Arroyo, who started attending Mass regularly two years ago.
``By increasing the prestige of the church, you might be setting up an eventual run-in between the church and state,'' said a Catholic official in South Florida who asked for anonymity. ``This is where you have to very careful. If someone thinks a Caritas volunteer is going to end up becoming the next mayor of a free Cuba, he may not live to be the next mayor.''
But Wenski cautions that neither the government nor exiles should expect the church to engage the government in a head-on confrontation.
``I don't think the church in Cuba, any more than the church in the United States, wants to be a parallel government [or] . . . a political party,'' Wenski said. ``The only thing the church asks of any government is that it allow it the space to be the church.''
Copyright © 1996 The Miami Herald