The other embargo - Cuba and church schools

The other embargo: Cuba and church schools
BY PAUL WEBSTER HARE
paulhare@bu.edu

This week, Pope Francis is visiting Cuba and the United States, the two
countries whose deal he brokered last year. That deal may have been the
easy part; he now has to engineer a new path for the Catholic Church in
Cuba.

For more than half a century, and for longer than the diplomatic rift
with the United States, Cuba has insisted that only the state can
legally run schools. The hundreds of thousands of Cuban children who
attended church schools before the 1959 revolution included Fidel and
Raúl Castro. In 2015, Cuban families still have no choice.

How might the pope approach what will be one of his diplomatic
objectives? The name of Felix Varela and the 1966 United Nations
International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which
Raúl Castro signed for Cuba in 2008, may be good starting points.

Varela, the Catholic priest and campaigner for human rights in 19th
century Cuba, taught and wrote tirelessly in Cuba and, after his exile,
in the United States. The pope will visit the center in Havana that
bears Varela's name. Raúl Castro has praised his work, saying
Christianity has more in common with communism than capitalism. And
Oswaldo Payá, the Christian dissident who was harassed relentlessly by
the government until his death in 2012, used Varela's name for a
petition to the Cuban national assembly for more openness and civil rights.

So Varela means a lot to many Cubans of all beliefs. The U.N. Convention
may seem an arcane instrument for a pope to bother with. But it contains
a provision that guarantees parents' rights to choose schools "to ensure
the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with
their own convictions." Banning faith schools is contrary to its
fundamental principles, and Cuba has formally accepted those principles.

Pope Francis will be talking to a government that, with the momentum to
scrap the U.S. embargo growing, will now have to explain why it
maintains its revolutionary-era decrees. Francis is fresh from visits to
Bolivia and Ecuador. Both countries boast left-wing governments who see
American influence on the continent as less than benign, but the
Catholic Church plays a strong role in society and politics.

In 2015, Ecuador's Catholic Church had 2,198 priests, ran 1,469 schools
and educational institutes, 173 hospitals and numerous orphanages and
homes for the elderly. In Bolivia, there were 1,208 priests, 1,791
Catholic schools and 183 hospitals. Yet in Cuba the comparable figures
would be around 360 priests, no schools and no hospitals.

The church has made progress in Cuba. It is no longer an object of
government repression. It has negotiated the establishment of a seminary
to train priests and permits to build a few new churches, which are
being funded by Catholics outside Cuba.

The church has also run in-house programs in computing and business
training, but this is a long way from reopening church schools. And the
revised Cuban foreign-investment law of 2014 still bans any foreign
investment in education.

These questions may seem of minor importance when Cubans do not yet see
their government with policies that will allow work and talent to build
significantly greater material prosperity.

But Raúl Castro's stance on the choice of schools will send an
unmistakable message. Either the revolution is still concerned with
controlling Cubans' choice and access to information or it will, in the
post-embargo era, show a willingness to drop it.

The church wants to do much more in Cuba, which is unique in Latin
America in preventing it activities in many areas. So the pope's visit
has a deeper agenda than set-piece masses and protocol.

And Francis, like the saint whose name he chose, is a man of action, not
just words.

PAUL WEBSTER HARE IS A FORMER BRITISH AMBASSADOR TO CUBA. HE TEACHES
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AT THE FREDERICK S. PARDEE SCHOOL OF GLOBAL
STUDIES AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY.

Source: The other embargo: Cuba and church schools | Miami Herald -
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article34948395.html