_WORLD WATCH______________________________
______________________CUBA________________________
Growing government intolerance
Stepping backward on religious freedoms
Government intolerance and repression of Catholics is growing in Communist Cuba following a period of openness toward religion that followed Pope John Paul II’s historic visit in January 1998, according to recent reports from the country.
The latest move is a law that revokes the degrees of professionals who enter a seminary or religious order. In recent years, a number of medical doctors have entered seminaries or joined the Jesuit or Franciscan communities. Under the new law, as priests or religious these physicians will be barred from practicing their profession.
The success the Church is having with young Cubans has also generated episodes of intolerance. On November 21, in a high school in the Havana suburb of Aguada de Pasajeros, when a holy card of the island’s patroness, Our Lady of Charity, dropped out of a book belonging to one of the fifth-grade pupils, the enraged teacher, Olga Lidia, tore it to pieces and warned the class not to bring religious pictures to school. When the pupils’ parents complained to the headmaster, the reply was “in Cuba, education is the duty of the state and not the right of the parents.”
Human-rights organizations have recently denounced other violations on the part of the government. In mid-November, a document protesting the government’s policies was circulated by the Study Commission for Freedom in Cuba and signed by several political prisoners detained in Havana, including Catholic dissident Maritza Lugo Fernandez. “I support this document 100 percent, as a dissident, a Catholic, and a woman,” said Fernandez, who has been arrested arbitrarily more than a dozen times.
Cuba’s most well known political prisoner is a Catholic doctor, Oscar Elias Biscet Gonzales, who has been detained since November 3, 1999. He is president of the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights and has been put in prison 26 times in 16 months. He is now serving two years at Cuba Si prison in east Havana for “dishonoring national symbols,” “disturbing public order,” and “instigating criminal action.” Biscet’s actual crime was his participation in a pro-life demonstration outside a hospital in Havana in February 1999.
Back to Catholic World Report January 2001 Table of Contents