Cuba: hatred or reconciliation?
By Leonardo Padura
June 08 2012
Taken from Espacio Laical which reproduced it with permission from Interpress Service
It will very soon be fifty years ago that I went for the last time, as a believer, inside a Catholic church. My mother, a Catholic by education, and my father, a Cuban Freemason, decided when I was six to have me attend catechism and take my first communion. When I turned seven, I received the sacrament, but almost immediately I made one of my first transcendental decisions: with my parent’s demand already satisfied, I closed my active relationship with church and faith in the divine, to devote my Sunday mornings to do what I really wanted, what I most deeply believed in: playing baseball with my friends.
Since then I have practiced – perhaps motivated by a certain social anti-religious compulsion very strong in Cuba fifty years ago- an atheism which may very well be a sort of agnosticism. For I tend to think that something transcendent might exist, though I don´t dare relating it with anything as concrete as a specific God.
The fact that I never again prayed either inside or outside a church, that I was not initiated as a Mason, and that I am an agnostic with no philosophical pretensions, has not prevented that many of the teachings derived from my mother´s Catholicism and my father´s fraternal practices have become part of my way to perceive and understand life. And one of those essential and better incorporated values is conciliation over revenge, not only as a religious or Masonic attitude, but as an ethical posture which everyman should practice.
Although what I have said so far could appear as related to my upbringing or fashion to comprehend the world, en reality what I have so far said has another intention. In short: to remind us that human ungratefulness can be infinite and so much so that very often tends to overshadow its simple contrary: gratefulness.
In the last weeks, which could be extended to months or years, the social role played by the Cuban Catholic Church, especially since the investiture of Jaime Ortega Alamino as cardinal, is proof of how any attempt to push forward a society cramped by immobility, marked by persistent hatreds and very often nourished by the most varied external and internal extremisms, may receive the reward of open ingratitude, insults and attacks verging on calumny.
I don´t share, philosophically speaking, all of the ideas of the Cuban cardinal. Neither can I say that his tactics and strategies appear to me as the most accurate, though I respect his political realism and perseverance. Nor am I going now to summarize the numerous achievements that his work as shepherd has guaranteed for the Cuban Church, mostly in the social field, and in the fostering of conciliation in a country where many a wound was inflicted. But, as a citizen who advocates for an improvement in the nation´s general conditions, I am glad to think that, under his guidance, the Cuban Catholic Church has managed to open spaces for dialogue, reflection, criticism and social presence necessary not only for believers but for the country as a whole.
The fact that Father Ortega Alamino has recently received a barrage of attacks, many of them ad hominem, cannot be judged as casual or simply spontaneous. The attempt to belittle his figure as well as the work of the institution he represents looks very much like a devaluation hiding certain specific and sometimes mean intentions. Because dialogue and political conciliation, the search for alternatives in an area characterized by confrontation and distance, in a country where reigns the system of one party-one government-one press, cannot please those who, inside or abroad, feed themselves from confrontation and hatred.
It seems evident to me that those social and political achievements of the Cuban Church in the last two decades, deserve acknowledgement and gratitude from those who dream of a better Cuba, regardless of their religious or political belief. It is also blatant that those who, acting outside official institutions but within the island, attempt to promote changes, are liable to receive the crossfire from both extremes, not seldom in a vicious personal manner, as if there was some kind of tacit agreement between both poles of the spectrum in order to systematically devaluate such attempts towards comprehension, coexistence or improvement.
Each one of these affaires, like the one happening right now around the figure and work of cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino, cannot fail to provoke enormous sadness. Because they look too much like those ungrateful and extremist postures which, however used we may be to them, only serve to show personal preeminence or worse still a complicity with stagnation. Will hatred and resentment be the sign marking the future of the island?
You can be a believer or not, a Catholic or not, but that which is really hard to admit is the offensive devaluation of a person who, whether or not we agree with his strategies or discourses, has earnestly worked for dialogue from within the island to ensure that its citizens live in a better country, more inclined to conciliation than to hatred and political fundamentalisms.
