Pope meets Castro as Cuba trip ends

Pope Benedict urged Cubans yesterday to search for “authentic freedom” and wound up his trip with a chat with the communist country’s revolutionary icon, Fidel Castro.

The men met in the Vatican embassy after the Pope celebrated an open-air mass for a crowd estimated at some 300,000 people in Havana’s Revolution Square.

Benedict, who said last week that communism no longer works in Cuba, pressed the government to let the Catholic Church teach religion in schools and universities.

Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi said Castro told the Pope he had watched the entire trip on television. They had an exchange of ideas about Church liturgy, the world situation, and science.

“Castro asked the Pope ‘What does a Pope do?’ and the Pope told him of his ministry, his trips, and his service to the Church,” Lombardi said.

Castro asked Benedict to choose a book for him to read and reflect on, and the Pope said he would.

Earlier the Pope led a Mass in the plaza that Castro used to fill with big crowds and fiery rhetoric in speeches.

Surrounded by ten-storey high images of Castro’s revolutionary comrades Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, the Pope read a sermon that continued one of the main themes of his trip — that Cuba should build a more open society, based on truth and reconciliation.

“The truth is a desire of the human person, the search for which always supposes the exercise of authentic freedom,” he said.

In an apparent dig at Marxism, he also said some “wrongly interpret this search for the truth, leading them to irrationality and fanaticism; they close themselves in ‘their truth,’ and try to impose it on others.”

He also made an apparent reference to Cuba’s tense relations with the US, which imposed an economic embargo on the island 50 years ago.

Reuters