Book on Cuban leader a runaway best-seller

Press, 12 February 1986, Page 49

Book on Cuban leader a runaway best-seller

By

LIONEL MARTIN

of Reuter (through NZPA) Havana A book in which the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro talks about revolution and religion with a Brazilian priest has become a runaway best-seller in this Communist island.

“Fidel and Religion” (Fidel y la Religion) offers insights into Dr Castro’s mind, summarising 23 hours of dialogue between him and a Dominican priest, Frei Betto. The book has been widely publicised by the official press. One Cuban official said: “We want everybody in Cuba to read the book and to be aware that any citizen has the right to believe in and practise his or her religion.” A man waiting in line to buy a copy said: “I am not religious but I suspect that Fidel’s book, from what I have heard of it, will mean that many Christians will come out of the closet and profess their faith more openly.” In the chats, Dr Castro reveals for the first time facts about his youth which laid the basis for his revolutionary beliefs. He explores relations between Cuba’s revolution and religion and has a theological discussion with Father Betto, an advocate of “liberation theology” which blends social philosophy with Christian teachings and has made inroads in the Catholic Church in Latin America.

Dr Castro tells Father Betto: “We consider that one must respect the rights of citizens to their beliefs just as one must respect their health, life, liberty and all other rights — that the right of an individual to his philosophic thought and re-

ligious beliefs is an inalienable right.” A priest at one of Havana’s largest Catholic churches said of the book: “Although only about 40,000 Cubans go to Catholic churches and around the same number to Protestant churches on average on Sunday, Castro’s pronouncements will enhance religious tolerance on the part of all Cubans.” He noted that Christmas trees had been effectively banned for many years, but that this year Christmas trees and ornaments had appeared in all hotels and Government-run enterprises. “Now that Christmas trees have been legitimised again I suspect you will see them in many private homes next year,” he said. In his conversations with Father Betto last May — the book has already been published in Brazil — Dr Castro said he planned to meet Cuban bishops and representatives of Protestant churches.

In September he fulfilled that pledge. Dr Adolfo Hamm, head of Cuba’s ecumenical council, said at the time that relations between the Cuban State and Church had taken a leap forward. As a gesture of good will, Dr Castro ordered the release of 75 Cuban political prisoners at the request of the United States bishops who visited Cuba.

Dr Castro acknowledges in the book that: “If (people) ask me if a certain form of subtle discrimination against Christians exists, I honestly have to say “Yes” — it is not intentional, deliberate or programmed. I speak as I think: I am against all forms of discrimination.”

Churchmen noted that

while the churches were free to work in Cuba, they were not allowed to publicly propagandise religion in mass outdoor meetings or in mass-circulation newspapers. The discrimination referred to by Dr Castro had to do with job promotion and access to some educational institutions, they said. In “Fidel and Religion,” Dr Castro tells of his upbringing on his father’s sugar cane and cattle farm in the mountains of eastern Cuba where his only friends were the barefoot children of poor local peasants. His father was a poor Spanish immigrant, he . says, who became well-to-do, and his mother was a poor Cuban peasant in her youth. He says that if fate had made him a second generation child of a wealthy family, he would have been raised in the city and would have had friends from another class with another outlook.

He recalls that until he was six years old he was called a “Jew,” a name given to children who were not baptised and in Dr Castro’s words “related with certain religious prejudices. ** Dr Castro says that right from the beginning of his revolutionary activities, he had “conceived a strategy of carrying out a profound social revolution.”

He says that in his conversation with a delegation of United States Catholic bishops a year ago, his starting point was the common ethics of Christianity and Socialism. “The Church criticises gluttony and Marxism-Len-inism also does with the same force: Egotism is something which we most criticise and it is also critic-

ised by the Church. Avarice is another thing which we criticise in common,” he told Father Betto.

Dr Castro says that Catholic nuns run several charitable institutions in Cuba such as old people’s homes and that they receive money from the Cuban Government.

“I have always mentioned the attitude of those nuns as a model for Communists,” he said.