Cuba must go beyond Good Friday gesture

Cuba must go beyond Good Friday gesture
Story Created: Apr 2, 2012 at 10:50 PM ECT

That Cuba will join the Caribbean and the Americas in officially marking
the Christian Holy Week climax of Good Friday marks an historic
evolution for the still Communist but no longer rhetorically atheist
republic. The decision to make Good Friday this week a public holiday
responds to the three-day visit to Cuba last week by Pope Benedict XVI.

Until the 1959 revolution, Christian influence, and officially
sanctioned religious observances, had been part of the Cuban life and
culture, in common with much of the Americas. The revolution, bringing
Fidel and Raul Castro to power, so exalted Communist and anti-religious
sentiment as to remove such reverences at least formally from the Cuban
experience.

Religion was never extinguished in revolutionary Cuba. By 1998, the
visit of Pope John Paul II stirred the wellsprings of a lingering
religiosity in the republic, amid a worldwide resurgence of interest in
entrenching and respecting political and other freedoms.

Pope John Paul appealed for the restoration of recognition of Christmas
with a public holiday. In response to a similar call by his successor,
the Cuban authorities conceded the Good Friday holiday. In this, the
leadership may be a step ahead of popular understanding, for news
reports profiled some ordinary Cubans as hardly knowing what Good Friday
is all about.

Even without the proximity of Easter, the central commemoration of
Christianity, last week's papal visit brought renewed attention to the
standing of Cuba in the Caribbean and in the world. In T&T, the Cuba
question came to the fore when President Raul Castro, here to attend an
international meeting last December, had been sensationally denied
accommodation by the American managers of the Hilton Trinidad.

Over that episode, T&T suffered the collateral damage of at least
national embarrassment. But at the Summit of the Americas here in 2009,
Cuba had also been pointedly excluded, also at the behest of the US.

The same pattern is set to apply at the next Summit scheduled for this
month for Cartagena, Colombia. That Cuba will not be among the 34 heads
of state and government attending the sixth Summit will remain a sore
point at the meeting which Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar will
presumably attend.

This month's summit will be another reminder of the need for T&T to take
its position among those demanding the proper accommodation of Cuba
within regional structures and activities such as the Americas Summits.
This country should also frontally denounce the continuing US trade embargo.

In doing so, T&T will find enlightened company calling for more
extensive guarantees of freedom within Cuba. Going beyond the Good
Friday gesture, Cuba should, as the Pope for one advocated, further
"open itself up to the world"… so that the world "may open itself up to
Cuba."

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