Cuba: Is the Pope Coming?

Today, weighed down with mundane concerns, Cubans seem to expect more from their own ability and initiative and far less from the impending visit of the Pope than they did from John Paul II's visit fourteen years ago, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban author and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages.

In this article, the author writes that the slightest easing of the socialist state's strict limits on private initiative and the consequent possibility of finding independent ways to improve living conditions has generated far more energy and interest than the lofty questions of politics and even faith. Large numbers of Cubans seem quite uninterested in whether or not the Pope is coming or when.

These are some of the same people who months earlier, while rushing to see the image of the Cuban virgin, were hoping to hear from Cuban authorities whether they might finally have Internet access (thanks to a fibre optic cable that seemed to have been lost at sea) or be allowed to travel freely abroad as a result of the not-yet-completed reform of certain emigration laws -among other postponed or vanished dreams.

People seem to think that the material problems of those who earn little and live badly will be hard to alleviate in the here and now with the visit of Benedict XVI. Those who earn more and want to prosper must think that supplies, taxes, and competition are their most pressing problems. Thus it is not strange that they are not boiling with expectations of the symbolic power of the pope's visit.

Their needs are terribly mundane, for now.

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages. His most recent work is The Man Who Loved Dogs, featuring Leon Trotsky and his assassin, Ramon Mercader, as central characters.

© Inter Press Service (2012) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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