Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  In Castro’s view, the affinity between Christianity and socialism was located not at the institutional level of the official Church and Party, but in the readiness to make sacrifices for an idea. “I’m sure that the same pillars that sustain the sacrifices a revolutionary makes today sustained the sacrifices made in the past by a martyr who died for his religious faith. I think that religious martyrs were generous, selfless men; they were made of the same stuff of which revolutionary heroes are made.”73 He still clearly remembered that during his school years “one of the things the Church felt most proud of… was the martyrology of the early years.”74 And his further remarks showed how much his revolutionary motivation was derived from the faith instilled in him as a child. His examination of early Church history strikes one as much more emotional and fundamental than his more calculated statement that he was already influenced by Marxism before the attack on the Moncada Barracks.

  There is no doubt … that Christianity was the religion of the slaves, of the oppressed and of the poor, who lived in the catacombs … and were subjected to all kinds of persecution and repression for centuries. The Roman Empire considered that doctrine to be revolutionary.… I always related [that], later on, to the history of the Communists… . The great historic truth is that the Communist movement also has its martyrology in its struggles to change an unfair social system.… If there was ever a name that the reactionaries hated more than “Communist,” it was “Christian,” in another time.75

  Castro agreed that “throughout the Church’s history its martyrs must have been motivated by something more inspiring than fear or punishment.” That was “much easier to understand” for people with a revolutionary background than for those whose only concern was to obtain material possessions, and to preserve their life rather than to sacrifice it. Like the Church before it, the revolution “called for self-sacrifice and, at times, for martyrdom, heroism and death.” It could not be appreciated too highly when someone chose to “give his life for a revolutionary idea and to fight, knowing he may die, … even though he knows there is nothing after death.”76 Castro himself had set an example of this in the way he lived his life, never showing fear in his student years or in the Sierra Maestra, or again when facing assassins in the pay of secret services or the US-backed mercenaries at the Bay of Pigs. All the time his great model was José Martí, the man whom Cuban revolutionaries and nationalists think of as the “apostle,” even though (or precisely because) the Catholic Church excommunicated him as a freemason and agnostic.

  However much Castro has avoided a self-relating personality cult as in China during Mao’s lifetime or the Soviet Union during Stalin’s, he has deliberately allowed a martyr cult to grow up around such dead heroes as Camilo Cienfuegos (who disappeared in his light aircraft a few weeks after the victory of the revolution) and, above all, Che Guevara. Just a few months before the Pope’s visit to Cuba, on the thirtieth anniversary of Che’s death, Castro arranged with a great flurry of propaganda for the recently rediscovered remains of his former comrade to be brought from Bolivia to Cuba and buried in a relatively modest mausoleum in Santa Clara, where in late 1958 he had won the decisive victory for the revolution. From then on, images of the national hero transfigured into a revolutionary martyr followed everyone around in their daily lives. In the museums dotted around the Sierra Maestra and at Playa Girón, as well as in the Museum of the Revolution in Havana, the personal objects of fallen heroes – even their bullet-riddled, bloodstained clothing – were put on display as so many priceless relics.

  This individual way of honoring heroes marked the limits of Castro’s identification with the basic beliefs of the institutional Church. He told Betto:

  If someone were to ask me when I held religious beliefs, I’d have to say, “Never, really.” I never really held a religious belief or had religious faith. At school, nobody ever managed to instill those values in me. Later on, I had other values: a political belief, a political faith, which I forged on my own, as a result of my experience, analysis and feelings… . Political ideas are worthless if they aren’t inspired by noble, selfless feelings. Likewise, noble feelings are worthless if they aren’t based on correct, fair ideas.77

  Castro therefore accepted that his teachers had sown the seeds of his later political development. What kept him from becoming a convinced follower of the Church was the lack of rationality in the Christian faith. Whereas Castro, with his sharp mind, learned to question everything and to take nothing as given, the Jesuits had to give him pat answers to elementary philosophical questions of human existence.

  Looking back, … I think that, in some respects, it wasn’t positive; everything was very dogmatic – “This is so because it has to be so.” You had to believe it, even if you didn’t understand it. If you didn’t, it was a fault, a sin, something worthy of punishment. Reasoning and feelings weren’t developed. It seems to me that religious faith, like political belief, should be based on reasoning, on the development of thought and feelings.… If you have to accept things because you’re told they are a certain way, you can’t argue or reason them out. Moreover, if the main argument used is reward or punishment – punishment more than reward – then it’s impossible to develop the reasoning and feelings that could be the basis of a sincere religious belief.78

  To demonstrate his unreceptiveness to the doctrine of his Jesuit teachers, Castro gives the example of their spiritual exercises.

  I remember long sermons for meditation on hell – its heat and the suffering, anguish and desperation it caused. I don’t know how such a cruel hell as the one described to us could have been invented, because such severity is inconceivable, no matter how great a person’s sins may have been… . I’d describe it as a form of mental terrorism; sometimes those explanations turned into mental terrorism.79

  Yet the moral rigor confronted Castro as a challenge.

  If you mix ethical values with a spirit of rebellion and rejection of injustice, you begin to appreciate and place a high value on a number of things that other people don’t value at all. A sense of personal dignity, honor and duty form the main foundation that enables people to acquire political awareness. This was especially so in my case, since I didn’t acquire it by having poor, proletarian or farm origins – that is, through social circumstance. I gained my political awareness through reasoning, thinking, by developing feelings and deep conviction. I think that what I was telling you about faith – the ability to reason, think, analyse, meditate and develop feelings – is what makes it possible to acquire revolutionary ideas. In my case, there was a special circumstance: nobody taught me political ideas.80

  Castro’s remarks on the dogmatic character of religious instruction naturally provoke some consideration of his own dogmatic shortcomings in the field of politics. In particular, critics of his system will find food for thought there about the prevailing socialist doctrine, as he used it in his assessment of Christian doctrine. Many of his close comrades, especially in the “26th of July Movement,” went through a dialectical process in relation to ideology that was similar to the one he described in relation to the Christian faith: that is, their “ability to reason, think, analyse, meditate and develop feelings” eventually kindled in them a desire for democracy. The consequences of such sins were and are incomparably harsher: the socialist “Inquisition” has usually given no pardon; “excommunication” has followed quickly and definitively.

  Nevertheless, the Bible has always been one of Castro’s favorite books. “I always liked biblical history, because its content was fascinating,” he told Betto; “few [stories] are as fascinating as the ones in the Old Testament.”81 This corresponds to the picture that, not least because of the petty-bourgeois and farmer-based structure of the 26th of July Movement, the Christian faith still played quite a large role for the Sierra Maestra revolutionaries, larger in any event that that of the Communist Manifesto, even if Castro later tried to give the opposite impression. (To Frei Betto, he insisted that he had had “not
only a revolutionary attitude but also a Marxist-Leninist, Socialist concept of political struggle several years before 1951,” as had “a handful of those of us who organized the 26th of July Movement.”82) In the mountains, and later during his march to victory, Castro even wore around his neck a holy image that a little girl in Santiago de Cuba had given him. Crucifixes and pictures of the Virgin Mary are said to have hung in his headquarters in the Sierra, and also in the early days in his office in Havana.

  Right from the beginning, the revolution had many friends among the lower clergy and lay people in the countryside; eight priests actually joined Castro in the Sierra Maestra, the best-known being Father Guillermo Sardiñas, who had the encouragement of Bishop Pérez Serantes in Santiago de Cuba. “He joined us not as a soldier but as a priest. He was there with the troops, living with us, sharing our daily lives. He had everything he needed to carry out his duties; he could even celebrate Mass.” Castro added that Sardiñas had performed “mainly religious, not political work,” especially administering baptism, which “was very important to the farmers.” “Father Sardiñas baptized scores of children there… . Families went to see him. They took their children and asked me to be their godfather, which in Cuba is like being a second father. I have a lot of godchildren in the Sierra Maestra.”83

  Until the victory of the revolution in 1959, the hierarchy had made an effort to remain neutral, once Cardinal Arteaga’s peace plan had been rejected by both sides. But then the revolutionary Fidel Castro came into serious conflict with his Church. To Frei Betto he insisted that there had not been “any problems with Catholic beliefs;” “the problems that arose concerned Catholic institutions.”84 And he explained:

  The Church in Cuba wasn’t popular; it wasn’t a Church of the people, the workers, the farmers, the low-income sectors of the population.… In our country, where 70 percent of the people lived in the countryside, there weren’t any rural churches, … not a single priest in the countryside! … Allegedly, it was a Catholic society, and it was customary to baptize children, … but there was no real religious education or religious practice. Religion in Cuba was disseminated, propagated, mainly through private schools – that is, schools run by religious orders – which were attended by the children of the wealthiest families in the country, the members of the old aristocracy, … the children of the upper middle class and part of the middle class in general… . besides, a large part of the clergy was of foreign origin, [mostly] Spaniards who held reactionary, right-wing, Spanish-Nationalist – even pro-Franco – ideas.85

  Often the richest families paid the priest’s income and the costs of running the parish.

  In 1960, according to Church sources, between 70 percent and 75 percent of Cubans were nominally Catholic – the lowest proportion anywhere in Latin America. Of those, 5 to 8 percent were considered to be practicing Catholics, who attended Mass at least four times a year.86 The number of priests was also low in Latin American terms: only one per 7,500 of the population.

  And yet, at the First National Catholic Congress on November 28, 1959, the bishops put a million people back on their feet in Revolution Square in Havana. In the rainy night, hundreds of thousands of candles greeted the arrival of a procession that had accompanied an image of the Merciful Virgin of Cobre throughout its journey of more than 600 miles from Santiago de Cuba at the other end of the island. The Church leaders wanted to show that the charismatic leader of the revolution (who himself attended the final Mass) was not the only one capable of mobilizing the masses.

  The greeting from Pope John XXIII to the Catholic Congress, and his appeal for it to seek mutual respect, forgiveness and reconciliation, was drowned out by a declaration of war from the leader of the lay Catholic university organization, José Ignacio Lasaga. While the crowd chanted “Cuba sí, comunismo no!”, he declaimed:

  Liberal capitalism allows there to be a few proprietors in the face of a multitude of dispossessed. Communism, and in general all totalitarian socialist regimes, converts all persons into the dispossessed, since there exists only one proprietor, that is, the State. An ideal social order would be one that permits all persons, in one or another form, to feel as if they were proprietors, in the fullest sense of the word.87

  But the Church did not succeed in marshaling the faithful behind it; its basis of trust in the countryside was too weak.

  The revolution met no resistance as it took up the needs of the rural population and enlisted rapidly growing support for its political goals. In the countryside, unlike in the cities, one often came across the attitude: “If Fidel’s a Communist, then I’m a Communist too.”

  Meanwhile, the estrangement between Church and people grew ever more pronounced, as the clergy maintained its identification with the old bourgeoisie and several top ecclesiastics allowed themselves to be used against the revolutionary government. The executive secretary of the Conference of Cuban Bishops, Monsignor Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, declared in 1970: “Many priests actively supported the counter-revolutionary movement that arose, especially after the summer of 1960, and that culminated in the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961.”88 Many leading figures in the Church even organized some counter-revolutionary groups. Manuel Artimé, for instance, from the influential Agrupación Católica, eventually founded a Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionario (MRR), which recruited mainly from Catholic student and youth organizations. The MRR worked closely with the CIA and played a considerable role in organizing the Bay of Pigs invasion, and after nearly two years in a Cuban prison Artimé left for Florida to join the inner circle of exiles and CIA agents who plotted in the sixties to assassinate Castro. His name later cropped up again in the circle of acquaintances of Kennedy’s presumed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as in connection with the break-in at the Democratic Party’s Watergate headquarters in Washington.

  On both sides of the Florida Strait, then, leading Church figures were involved in the most cynical operations to undermine the moral authority of the revolutionary government. Castro told Betto:

  For instance, as part of the campaign to promote the exodus, a completely false decree was invented one day – it was said that somebody had taken the decree out of a ministry. It was alleged to be a decree to deprive families of legal authority over their children… . Another rumor was that the children were going to be sent to the Soviet Union.89

  The director of the Catholic Service Bureau in Miami, Monsignor Walsh, claimed that he had himself hatched and launched this operation together with people from the State Department and the CIA, with the support of a Church leader in Cuba. According to Walsh, rumors alone led to the flight of 15,000 children from Cuba between December 1960 and October 1962, as their parents feared their sons and daughters would otherwise be shipped off to Siberia. Instead they landed in US reception camps, where politicians briefly came to visit them as living testimony to the foulness of the Castro regime, and gave them candy and toys before lining them up to be photographed. Many of the children did not see their parents again for a long time – some never did at all.90 The whole thing was named Operation Peter Pan, after the little boy in James Barrie’s tale who did not want to grow up and led a lost band of children from Never-Never Land. Here, “Peter Pan” was the CIA.

  Tensions between the revolutionary government and the Church leadership sharpened in May 1960, when Castro’s long-time “resident priest” and supporter, Archbishop Pérez Serantes, came out openly against the revolution following the establishment of diplomatic relations with the USSR. In a pastoral letter he announced that the frontiers between the Church and its enemies were now clearly defined: “We cannot say that communism is at our doors for in reality it is within our walls, speaking out as if it were at home;”91 any cooperation with Communism was out of the question. Margaret Crahan, a US researcher on religion, described the situation as so tense that, even though the government had not issued any anti-religious laws, many Catholic dignitaries took refuge in a veritable laager mentality.92
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br />   Revolutionary militias searched numerous Catholic schools for weapons during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and after its collapse the government closed down all private Church schools and banned Artimé’s “Agrupación Católica.” On September 12, 132 Spanish priests found guilty of counter-revolutionary activity were expelled from the country on board the Covadonga. Two years later, in 1963, 70 percent of the 723 Catholic priests and 90 percent of the 2,225 members of religious orders had been compelled to leave the island.93 Their duties were taken over, if at all, by lay persons.

  Whereas, at the beginning of the revolution, measures were taken only against top people in the Church, pressure came to be exerted against ordinary members. Under the growing influence of the PSP, Party officials disrupted Masses, harassed people attending Bible classes, and pilloried religious children at school before their teachers and classmates. Any commitment to the Church was regarded as suspicious, because the counter-revolutionary groups operating in the Escambray Mountains also included some religiously motivated associations. Castro told Betto: “There were also cases of complicity with serious counter-revolutionary activities, which could have led to trial and such severe punishment as execution. In no case was this applied, however… . Regardless of the circumstances, we didn’t want to … present the image of the Revolution executing a priest.”94