More than fifty years after Vatican II, it boggles the mind to think that like so many other realities in Cuba, the Church was also put to a long and painful slumber that begun January 1st 1959. The onset of Fidel Castro’s revolution began just three weeks before Pope John XXIII announced that the Catholic Church would undertake a Diocesan Synod and a General Ecumenical Council.  Throughout the Council’s progression and afterward, the Catholic Church in Cuba was insulated from much of the changes of Vatican II because for political reasons many Cuban Catholics became part of a national diaspora and those who stayed were not free to practice their faith. Unlike all other Central, South American and Caribbean contexts of the 1960’s Cuba’s Catholic Church was rendered relatively invisible.  To further reflect upon the reality of Vatican II and the Church in Cuba, I shall paraphrase Johann Baptist Metz in acknowledging that “one cannot do theology with their back to [the Cuban Revolution]”

In the wake of World War II, the global church had entered a period of discernment and dialogue that unquestionably opened the space for new ways of being in the world as Catholic and Christian, but Cuba began a serious political, cultural, shift that would render the Catholic Church a silent observer of its own history.  As John XXIII and Paul VI were committed to “reading the signs of the times,” Fidel Castro announced his military triumph on the small Island nation, and began an alliance with the Soviet Union. As Castro adopted an atheist identity rooted in Marxist and Leninist thought, he promoted social justice, a classless state and nationalist solidarity devoid of God. In an Island racked with a history of Colonial oppression, slavery, war, and political corruption, the rhetoric took hold and many people rallied with Fidel to defend the defenseless. By 1961 however the revolutionary government in Cuba deemed the Roman Catholic Church an enemy of the state and demonized the community for being bourgeoisie, aligned with the Spanish crown, or imperialist oppressors of the working class and the poor. The clergy and religious leaders were summarily dismissed.  Those who spoke out against the regime were expelled, imprisoned, or executed.  Catholic schools and hospitals were expropriated and any Church property that was “abandoned” by those who fled the country was taken over by the state.  In many ways this secured Fidel’s totalitarian rule because the only other organized and legitimate power in the country, the Catholic Church, had been rendered invisible. After Fidel took on the status of a demigod, his most fierce competition, the institutional Church was rendered irrelevant and the Cuban people entered 40 years of darkness and isolation.

As the Constitution of the Church in the Modern World was being written in Rome, the national constitution in Cuba was re-written as well.  Much more can be said about the history of this Island nation but suffice it to say that the remnant of Catholic priests who stayed basically “kept house” and ministered to an estimated 2% of the Catholics which also stayed but always at great risk. Although bare boned, this seemingly “underground Church” never lost hope, it grew in fervor amidst the suffering, in large part thanks to changes implemented by Vatican II’s, Gaudium et Spes and Lumen Gentium. The empowerment of the laity rooted in the sacrament of baptism also gave rise to a people willing to hear and preach the word of God and the teachings of the church in the vernacular, and provided for a much more grounded and portable Church.  In Cuba these were perhaps the most significant changes for the Church, since in the context of an increasingly impoverished milieu, the laity (mostly women), religious sisters and brothers as well as third order religious were able to minister to people’s spiritual needs without a clerical directive.  In one case a woman I know whom I will call Mercedes, belonged to a third order group of religious woman.  She was a widow, and had a decent government job and a modest home but outside of her work she volunteered to bring communion to the infirm, to help catechize older adults who had been away from the Church and to lead prayers for the deceased in rural parts of her province.  One day, a supervisor came to her office and told her that under the rules of her place of work she was not allowed to participate in any religious activities – and that she must declare her single-minded allegiance to the state right then and there.  She handed the officer her keys.  Within 2 days she lost her home as well. 

In the 1980’s inspired by CELAM’s Medellin (1968) and Puebla (1979) Conferences with their new vision of an evangelizing missionary Church committed to the poor (their implementation of Vatican II), the Catholic Church in Cuba came out of the “catacombs” with a grassroots reflection process called the “REC” (Reflexion Eclesial Cubana) culminating in the 1986 event ENEC (Encuentro Nacional Eclesial Cubano). The ENEC produced not just an outstanding document but a true renewal and incarnation of the Vatican II vision specific for Cuba – a poor, evangelizing, missionary church of clergy, religious and lay, committed to reaching out to the marginalized and forgotten and impacting all aspects of daily life and civil society.

In 1990 when the collapse of the Soviet Union crippled Cuba’s already fledgling economy, the humanitarian crisis in Cuba had reached a boiling point.  The hardships were unimaginable and people took to throwing themselves to sea in makeshift rafts comforted by 50 to 50 odds of death or life outside of Cuba vs life inside of Cuba. It was at this time that the Catholic Church via Caritas Internacionales and other faith based organizations along with the Red Cross increased its outreach to provide humanitarian aid to the Cuban people.  In 1994 Pope John Paul II set his sights on Cuba with his aim of further dismantling communism and requested a meeting with Fidel and a visit to Cuba. By 1996 Fidel would change the Cuban constitution, declaring that Cuba was a secular State and thereby de-criminalizing participation in organized religion.  John Paul II would visit Cuba in 1998 and celebrate the first public mass in over 37 years.  His parting gift to the people was the return of Christmas as a national holiday.  Although superficially this gift seemed inconsequential to the quotidian realities of the Cuban people, Christmas is a profoundly symbolic gift.  In Cuba, where all semblance of Jesus was removed after 1961, to be allowed to celebrate the birth of Christ anew is grace.  After pope Benedict’s visit in 2012, his parting gift was the recognition and celebration of Good Friday—many would say a reality enfleshed in the lives of much of the Cuban community.  Thanks to the changes of Vatican II the laity in collaboration with a few clergy have been keeping the faith, and maintaining against all odds, hope, charity, and love alive.

Now the world is watching as pope Francis visits Cuba after brokering a thaw between US and Cuba relations and a dialogue that could promote substantive change for the people in due time.  I would say that now Vatican II comes to a most profound and prophetic moment in Cuba when it empowers the Church to be and act mercifully in the wake of so much sin, suffering and death, and without forgetting her losses is able to sing “Glory to God in the highest and peace to God’s people on earth…”