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The Catholic charity Caritas, for example, hopes to launch a microloan project to help Cubans grow beyond the timbiriches, or tiny informal businesses that constitute the Cuban private sector so far, to larger private enterprises like small factories. If Havana and Washington permit it, nonprofit groups in the U.S. and Europe are set, they tell me, to channel tens of millions of dollars to Caritas for a microcredit fund. "My last hope is the church," says Roque, a middle-aged former Cuban soldier in Havana who wants to start a courier service. "They help with extra food and are sending me to computer lessons." Says Carlos Saladrigas, a co-chairman of the Washington-based Cuba Study Group: "The church is mobilizing Cuban civil society away from the state nonetheless, and that could have big democratizing effects down the road."
The Jesuit-educated Fidel declared Cuba an atheist state in 1960: he banned Catholic media, expropriated church schools and exiled or hounded out 3,500 priests and nuns. Only 200 clerics remained to minister to millions of Cuban Catholics. The openly faithful, including priests like Ortega, were often sent to labor camps for "re-education." The church began to regain its footing in the 1980s, and its fortunes rose further with the economy's collapse in the 1990s, after the fall of Cuba's benefactor, the Soviet Union. Suddenly sensing the usefulness of Catholic aid organizations like Caritas, whose Cuban chapter Ortega founded in 1991, Fidel proclaimed the island a merely "secular" state.
Then, in 1998, he welcomed John Paul II, and the planning of that event, says Wenski, was a watershed: "It gave Catholics there a new confidence and planted the seeds of civil society." That was evidenced by critical new Catholic publications like Vitral magazine, one of Cuba's first independent media outlets--and by increased friction with the state. Many if not most Cuban dissidents hail from Catholic groups like the Damas de Blanco, founded by the wives of political prisoners, and the Christian Liberation Movement, headed by Cuba's leading dissident, Oswaldo Pay. Some 75 of his organization's members were thrown into prison in 2003 after embarrassing Fidel by gathering the requisite signatures for a constitutional referendum on democratic reform.
It wasn't until the more pragmatic Ral succeeded Fidel in 2008 that the church emerged as a political as well as spiritual player. Some clergy, like Havana Vicar General Carlos Manuel de Cspedes, opened dialogue with the all-powerful Cuban Communist Party; others tested the limits of that discussion, among them the Rev. Jos Conrado Rodrguez of Santiago, who boldly sent Ral a letter in 2009 complaining of "constant and unjustifiable human-rights violations" in Cuba. Though closely watched by the state, Rodrguez has not been jailed.