I deeply admire the priests of the Catholic Church for renouncing their families, a life partnership, and denying themselves to devote entirely to others.
It requires a lot of determination and inner strength to do that.
In Cuba, I met several Cuban and foreign priests who helped me a lot when I was imprisoned and after being released from my two prisons, when the ostracism I suffered seemed to be destroying me. The help I received was what led me to become a practicing Catholic almost immediately after my first release from prison on August 12, 2003. Several of these priests—among them three Bishops—left a lasting mark on me with their generosity, teachings, and consistency.
It goes without saying that behind every priest of our Church, I always see a man of good will.
But amid the confusion and media manipulation that plagues the contemporary world, many falsehoods and half-truths about Cuba end up being accepted as absolute truths by some, including people from our Church, who forget—as today’s reading for Friday, July 12, states—that we must “be as innocent as doves and as shrewd as serpents.”
Due to this confusion and media manipulation, we continue to hear the euphemism of the U.S. commercial embargo on Cuba and also the call from certain politicians and cultural figures who wish for Cuba to be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Last Wednesday, July 10, I saw published in Cubadebate, the den of the Castro regime’s zealots, a letter addressed to Antony Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State, signed by Monsignor Elias Zaidan, an American Bishop who chairs the Justice and Peace Commission of the Catholic Church in this country. In that letter, the Bishop asks the Secretary of State to exclude Cuba from the mentioned list, “for the good of the Cuban people.”
As soon as I finished reading the letter, I felt uncomfortable and sad, realizing that someone who chairs that ecclesial commission, the one most linked to the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church, where the respect for all human rights is defended and proclaimed, would make such a request. So I wrote a letter to Monsignor Zaidan expressing my disagreement and mailed it yesterday.
I do not know if the Bishop acted on his own or at the request of others. What I do know is that his request demonstrates great ignorance of the Cuban reality.
It is true that Cuba’s inclusion in that list harms the Cuban people, but it is also true that removing it from the list will not bring any benefit to them; on the contrary, it will serve to economically and politically strengthen the Castro mafia.
What many people of good will forget is that the root cause of the Cuban crisis, from the beginning, is not the Cuba-U.S. dispute but Fidel Castro’s betrayal of the programmatic documents of the Cuban revolution, among which are “History Will Absolve Me,” “The Mexico Pact,” and “The Sierra Maestra Pact.” Fidel Castro is the greatest traitor and the most deceitful politician in our history. He is also the man who did the most harm to our country. I write in the present tense because the leaders of “continuity” practice the same methods as their leader.
Making concessions to the dictatorship without it taking concrete actions to demonstrate that it will settle the enormous historical debt it still owes to Cubans, which is nothing other than fulfilling the promises made in those documents, is naive. This has been well demonstrated by the 65 years of dictatorship, including the mistakes of the Obama administration.
The Cuban dictatorship is not only complicit in international terrorism but also sponsors it. That is why it was re-included in that list in 2021. This is something Monsignor Zaidan forgets or is unaware of.
Asking the U.S. government to make concessions without the dictatorship demonstrating with concrete actions that it will respect all the human, civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights of all Cubans, rather than helping our suffering people, would be another gesture in favor of those who oppress them. That has nothing to do with God’s message.
As the saying attributed to Saint Francis de Sales goes: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Roberto de Jesús Quiñones Haces