Fidel & Religion by Fidel Castro

Author:Fidel Castro [Castro, Fidel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ocean Press
Published: 2016-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

INITIAL TENSIONS WITH THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Frei Betto: What were the tensions with the church like at that moment?

Fidel Castro: The tensions with the church emerged when the revolution clashed with those privileged sectors. That is the historical truth.

In the first place, the archbishop of Havana, who later became a cardinal — I think he became a cardinal before the revolution — had excellent official relations with the Batista dictatorship.

Frei Betto: What was his name?

Fidel Castro: Manuel Arteaga. He had excellent relations with Batista. That was one of the things he was criticized for.

I remember that in the early days of the revolution, I met with all the authorities. In those early days, a lot of people started requesting meetings, and out of courtesy I tried to see everybody who wanted to meet with me. That’s when I had a lot of meetings with representatives of the classes that considered themselves responsible for progress: the president of the industrialists’ association, the president of the merchants’ association, the presidents of other associations, and the high-ranking ecclesiastical hierarchy. All of those institutions started requesting meetings with me, and I saw everybody who wanted to see me.

I remember the early days in Havana. After three or four weeks when we’d managed to establish some order, I tried to organize my work and found myself with an enormous agenda of interviews. This went on for about 15 or 20 days, two or three weeks, until I discovered that my life was the most sterile thing in the world and that, if I went on that way, I’d be doing nothing but meeting with prominent figures — the ones who met with the government — even though I didn’t hold any executive position. The government was operating; I had my post as commander-in-chief of the Rebel Army and was very careful not to meddle in government affairs.

Frei Betto: Urrutia was president?

Fidel Castro: Yes, there was a provisional president, a judge who’d had a correct attitude in Santiago de Cuba and who’d won prestige because he’d acquitted some revolutionaries — those were his merits. We promoted him to that post without his having had any participation in the revolutionary process — among other things because we wanted to make it absolutely clear that we weren’t after public positions. So as soon as the revolution triumphed, we handed the government over to him. The problem was he was somewhere up in a cloud; he was totally unrealistic. He started to create difficulties right from the beginning. He even adopted attitudes against the workers. He created some very difficult situations. I had to meet with the workers and explain that they had to be understanding, patient; I also had to meet with the Council of Ministers and say, “Political problems are being created.”

There were no problems with the first laws passed by the revolution, but the judge was what we might call a right-wing president. At one point this led to a serious conflict. He started making anticommunist statements,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.