I planned this work in 1979. I had proposed the idea of a book to be called La Fe en el socialismo (Faith in socialism) to Enio Silveira, my beloved editor and brother in God. In order to carry it out, I would have to travel in the socialist countries so as to get in contact with the Christian communities living under a regime classified as materialist and atheist. Many tasks forced me to set the idea aside; moreover, it would have proved too expensive.
Immediately after the triumph of the Sandinista revolution, the pastoral centers in Nicaragua invited me to offer advisory services in meetings and training, especially for the farmers. I went to that country two or three times a year to preach in spiritual retreats, give introductory Bible study courses, and help the Christian communities in articulating their life of faith with political commitment. I completed a program sponsored by the Center for Agrarian Promotion and Education that consisted of seven pastoral meetings with the farmers in the mountains of Diriamba, in El Crucero. Those trips enabled me to get to know the priests who served the people’s regime of Nicaragua. On July 19, 1980, I took part as an official guest in the celebration of the first anniversary of the revolution. That same evening, Father Miguel D’Escoto, the minister of foreign affairs, took me to the home of Sergio Ramírez, now vice-president of the republic. That was the first time I talked with Fidel Castro, whom I had seen that morning at the people’s rally, at which he had spoken.
I remembered the impact that his statements to the priests he had met with in Chile in November 1971 had made on me. I’d read them as a political prisoner in São Paulo, serving a four-year sentence “for reasons of national security.” On that occasion, he had said, “In a revolution, there are moral factors which are decisive. Our countries are too poor to give men great material wealth, but they can give them a sense of equality, of human dignity.” He said that on his protocol visit to Cardinal Silva Henríquez of Santiago, he’d spoken to him “about our peoples’ objective need to free themselves and of the need for Christians and revolutionaries to unite for this purpose.” He said that it wasn’t Cuba’s exclusive interest, since it didn’t face that sort of problem, but within the Latin American context, it was “an interest and a duty of all revolutionaries and Christians — many of them poor men and women of the people — to close ranks in a liberation process that is inevitable.” The cardinal gave the Cuban leader a Bible and asked if the gift annoyed him. “Why should it?” Fidel answered. “This is a great book. I read it, studied it as a boy, and I’ll brush up on many things I’m interested in.”
One of the priests asked him what he thought about the presence of priests in politics. “How, for example, can any spiritual guide of a human collective ignore its material problems, its human problems, its vital problems? Can it be that those material, human problems are independent of the historical process? Are they independent of social phenomena? We’ve experienced all that. I always go back to the time of primitive slavery. That’s also the time when Christianity emerged.” He observed that Christians had “gone from a stage in which they were persecuted to others in which they were the persecutors” and that the Inquisition “was a period of obscurantism, when men were burned.” Now, Christianity could be “a real rather than a utopian doctrine, not a spiritual consolation for those who suffer. Classes may disappear, and a communist society may arise. Where is the contradiction with Christianity? Rather than a contradiction, there would be a revival of early Christianity, with its fairer, more human, more moral values.”
Addressing the Chilean clergy, Fidel recalled the time he attended a Catholic school. “What was happening to the Catholic religion? A great slackening. It was merely formal and had no substance. Nearly all education was permeated with this. I studied with the Jesuits. They were strict, disciplined, rigorous, intelligent, and strong-willed men. I’ve always said this. But I also experienced the irrationality of that kind of education. Just between us, I tell you there’s great coincidence between Christianity’s objectives and the ones we communists seek, between the Christian teachings of humility, austerity, selflessness, and loving thy neighbor and what we might call the content of a revolutionary’s life and behavior. For, what are we teaching the people? To kill? To steal? To be selfish? To exploit others? Just the opposite. Responding to different motivations, we advocate attitudes and behavior that are quite similar.
We are living at a time when politics has entered a near-religious sphere with regard to human beings and their behavior. I also believe that we have come to a time when religion can enter the political sphere with regard to individuals and their material needs. We could endorse nearly all of the Commandments: Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal…” After criticizing capitalism, Fidel said, “There are 10,000 times more coincidences between Christianity and communism than between Christianity and capitalism… We should not create those divisions among men. Let’s respect convictions, beliefs, and explanations. Everyone is entitled to their own positions, their own beliefs.
We must work in the sphere of these human problems that interest us all and constitute a duty for all.” In regard to the Cuban nuns who work in hospitals, he stressed that “the things they do are the things we want communists to do. When they take care of people with leprosy, tuberculosis, and other communicable diseases, they are doing what we want communists to do. A person who is devoted to an idea, to work, and who sacrifices himself or herself for others is doing what we want communists to do. I say this in all frankness.”
There, in Sergio Ramírez’s library, I remembered that talk between the revolutionary from the Sierra Maestra and the Chilean priests — I’m consulting it now — and it served as a basis for our exchange of ideas on the religious question in Cuba and the rest of Latin America. On that occasion in Chile, one of the participants asked him if his crisis of faith had taken place before or during the revolution. He answered that faith had never been inculcated in him. “I could say that I never had it. It was a mechanical, not a rational thing.” Recalling his experiences in the guerrilla war, he commented, “No churches had ever been built in the mountains, but a Presbyterian missionary went there and the members of some so-called sects did too, and they got some followers. They used to tell us, ‘Don’t eat animal fat.’ And they wouldn’t eat it; they wouldn’t eat it! There wasn’t any vegetable oil, and they went without lard for a whole month. That was their precept, and they abided by it. All of those small groups were much more consistent. I’ve heard that US Catholics, too, are much more practical in terms of religion — not socially, because when they went and organized the Bay of Pigs invasion and the war in Vietnam and other things of that sort, they weren’t being consistent. I’d say that the wealthy classes distorted religion and made it serve them. What is a priest? Is he a landowner? Is he an industrialist? I always used to read the discussions between the communist and Don Camilo — the famous priest in Italian literature. I’d say that was one of the first attempts to dispel that atmosphere…”
In connection with Cuba, a priest asked him to what extent Christians had been an obstacle to or a driving force in the revolution. “No one can say that the Christians were an obstacle. Some Christians participated in the struggle at the end; there were even some martyrs.
“Three or four students from the Belén College were murdered in northern Pinar del Río. There were some priests, such as Father Sardiñas, who joined our ranks on their own. An obstacle? What happened at the beginning was a class problem. It didn’t have anything to do with religion. It was the religion of the landowners and the wealthy. When the socioeconomic conflict erupted, they tried to pit religion against the revolution. That was what happened, the cause of the conflicts. The Spanish clergy was quite reactionary.” At the end of the long talk with the Chilean priests, Fidel Castro emphasized that the alliance between Christians and Marxists wasn’t just a matter of tactics. “We would like to be strategic allies, which means permanent allies.”
Fidel Castro returned to the topic of religion during his visit to Jamaica in October 1977, nearly six years after his trip to Allende’s Chile. This time, he was addressing a mainly Protestant audience. He reaffirmed that “at no time has the Cuban revolution been inspired by antireligious feelings. We based ourselves on the deep conviction that there needn’t be any contradiction between a social revolution and the people’s religious