By Megan Moore
On his visit to Cuba in 1998, Pope John Paul II said: ‘Called to overcome isolation, [Cuba] needs to open herself to the world and the world needs to draw close to Cuba, her people, her sons and daughters who are surely her greatest wealth.’
Less than a decade previously he, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had together helped bring about the defeat of the Soviet Union through staunch and uncompromising opposition to the evils of Communism, with the Holy Father providing spiritual leadership in complement to the statesmanship of Thatcher and Reagan. As such his words to the people of Cuba were a powerful witness to hope of the kind that had energised pro-democracy activists across the Soviet-tyrannised world and, most significantly, given birth to the Solidarity movement of his native Poland.
These words are now being quoted by the human rights campaigning group Una Cuba in a petition urging John Paul II’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, to engage with pro-democracy activists on his upcoming visit to the country on the 26th March. They ask him to ‘bend the arc of the moral universe’, and ‘continue the Church’s historic tradition’ of aiding the oppressed. For Cuba remains a country in which the basic rights of citizens are routinely curtailed, dissidents are imprisoned, and economic freedom is barely existent. The current regime under Raul Castro may occasionally enact superficial ‘readjustments’, but at its core is a squalid denial of human dignity which would have been sadly familiar to Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II. Continue reading
