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But after praying at Our Lady of Charity's shrine in the eastern copper-mining town of El Cobre, Benedict will still encounter a Good Friday's worth of political pain in Cuba, as well as criticism of how the church is confronting it. Castro foes say the church should confess that it isn't doing enough to spark regime change in Cuba--even as Castro fans fear that the church may be doing too much to kindle it. Cuban-American U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, calls Ortega, Havana's Archbishop, a Castro "collaborator" more focused on the church's corporate growth than on Cuba's dismal human-rights record. Meanwhile, the independent Cuban Commission for Human Rights & National Reconciliation reports that police, working to dispel any notion that the Pope's visit is the start of a Caribbean Spring, have made more than 2,000 "arbitrary arrests for political motives" since December and that progovernment militants are "violently harassing" the Catholic dissident group Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White) in cities like Santiago, Benedict's first stop. Ral insists his government hasn't ordered or condoned the bullying of democracy activists like the Damas. But his police made a point of rounding up and detaining scores of the women on March 18, including their leader, Bertha Soler, during one of their regular marches. (She and almost all the others were later let go.)
If a charismatic Cold Warrior like John Paul II couldn't raze the tropical Berlin Wall, it's doubtful an aloof theologian like Benedict XVI will. Still, Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, who has aided the Cuban church's resurrection, insists the ties between Havana and the Holy See are "opening new space for individual initiative and independent thought," which he believes will hasten communism's demise when Fidel and Ral are gone. Until then, Ortega says, the church has to guard against "overreaching." But, says Juan Clark, an emeritus professor of sociology at Miami Dade College and the author of Religious Repression in Cuba, "while it's admirable that the Cuban church is moving fences, eventually people are going to demand that you do more to tear those fences down"--as the church did in Eastern Europe a generation ago.
In the short run, the church does risk being used by the regime. But in the long run, the regime is taking the larger gamble. As repressed as Cubans feel politically, their bigger concerns are economic: most earn a meager $20 a month. Among the church's most popular diocesan programs, as a result, are its clases de liderazgo, or leadership classes. They fill the vacuum left by state-run schools and universities--which know Marx but not marketing--by teaching Cubans the kind of free-enterprise skills they'll need under Ral's reforms. (Ortega's archdiocese, apparently with Ral's blessing, has partnered with a Spanish university to offer an M.B.A. program.) Just as important, they also impart the sort of community-organization tools once considered solely the domain of the communist state.