In a recording of a conversation with former political prisoners in 2010, Havana’s Archbishop, the late Cardinal Jaime Ortega, revealed his true intentions: protecting himself at the cost of his flock. The recordings captured Ortega telling the Cuban dissidents that he would not support democracy in Cuba and that his job was to protect the “church,” not them. In other words, the shepherd told his sheep he was not going to protect them from the wolf that wanted to devour them and they were on their own.
While this may come as a surprise to some, it is nothing new to those who were familiar with Ortega, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 82. The Archbishop was infamous for his chummy relationship with the communist Castro dictatorship, and his barely veiled disdain for Cuban dissidents who he saw as obstacles to his personal ambitions.
Via Diario de Cuba (my translation):
Details of a meeting between the late Cardinal Ortega and former Cuban political prisoners come to light
In 2010, the late Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino asserted that the Catholic Church would not support any opposition proposal for the democratization of Cuba. This is reflected in the recording of a meeting held in Spain between the then Archbishop of Havana and recently released political prisoners from the Group of 75.
“What the Church in Cuba has earned is the independence with which it has always acted. There can be no collusion with anything, neither with them [the regime] nor with anyone [the democratic opposition]. This costs the Church a lot. It is a very high price to pay because it entails much suffering,” said the cardinal.
Fourteen years after the meeting, and 21 years after the Black Spring of 2003, which led to the imprisonment of dissidents and journalists, DIARIO DE CUBA recalls Ortega’s role in those releases-deportations and contextualizes it with the current vision of some protagonists.
Former prisoner Normando Hernández handed him the Freedom Project, hoping that the Church would support it, but the cardinal responded with the aforementioned refusal and added: “What needs to be considered is the dignity of the human being, their rights. It is there where only the Church can act.”
Hernández did not respond to numerous requests to comment on the events revealed in the audio.
The setting and the protagonists
The meeting took place at the home of activist Elena Larrinaga. The current president of the Christian Democratic Party of Cuba told DDC that “the prisoners were impeccable, they arrived punctually, were polite with him, they handed him some documentation, and asked him some questions.”
“But it was a difficult meeting,” she says. “It was not very affectionate. He seemed very stiff, it was clear that he was not comfortable.”
The cardinal recalled before the former prisoners a request he made to the deceased leader of the Ladies in White, Laura Pollán, to “calm the people” and avoid “scandal.”
“I told Laura, ‘there are two ways to act here.’ I wrote a letter to Raúl Castro, by hand, and he responded positively. I don’t know the reasons, but the fact happened, and there we are. There was another way to do it: a public letter in which scandal was caused,” Ortega argues in the recording accessed by DIARIO DE CUBA.
According to him, if the second option had occurred, the press would have published that “the cardinal is brave,” but “everyone would stay in jail; everyone would remain the same, and problems would not be solved because I would have used something as a propaganda or self-affirmation banner.”
“For now, because of that, you calm the people, because things are being done for them, so that those who are going to stay, will soon get out. They will come out. That is the only way the Church can have, that of love,” he insisted.
The priest Ariel Suárez, who accompanied the cardinal at that meeting and is the current deputy secretary of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Cuba (COCC), indicated to this newspaper that he remembers “a conversation in a very affable and cordial tone.”
“The phrase attributed to Cardinal Ortega does not seem to have been said by him. It does not fit his style, who explained a thousand times during his episcopate what the mission of the Church is, a positive argumentation about the nature and purpose of the Church. He spoke about what the Church is called to do, and from there the interlocutor infers what does not correspond to him,” Suárez affirmed.
He also said that, “in that effort, he always had the support and respect of Saint John Paul II and later, Benedict XVI.”
Acknowledgments and Pressures
The former prisoners almost unanimously recognized Jaime Ortega for the efforts made before the regime in Havana.
“We came with our consent. I thanked him over the phone, for all his efforts. On behalf of all of us who are here, we thank him for the efforts he has made on our behalf, so that we could meet with our family here in Spain,” said one of those present.
They also thanked him for the “opportunity” to meet in Madrid.
“The gratitude of those present prevailed, for his supposed intervention on our behalf. In reality, the dictatorship used him to get out of a situation that was not favorable to it. And so it appeared that it did not yield to pressure,” opines Luis Enrique Ferrer García, one of the attendees at the meeting in Madrid.
Days earlier, the controversy had made headlines in the local press due to Ortega’s alleged refusal to meet with the former prisoners he helped leave the island.
“What a surprise to open the newspaper ABC and see ‘the cardinal avoids [meeting with the former prisoners].’ When did I say that I don’t want to see them? In a newspaper from Galicia, the headline was worse, it said ‘rejects.’ But how could I reject? I cannot, it would be a contradiction, the silliest thing in life,” he affirmed.
According to Larrinaga, the press was fairly close to the truth.
“I know for a fact that Cardinal Ortega was very reluctant to meet with the prisoners, and in fact, he had to be pressured. It was not acceptable that this man, who had called the prisoners in jail to offer them this option, was in Madrid and did not sit with them to face them a little,” revealed the activist.
“Unity” in the Prison Factory
In the meetings before the releases, Ortega insisted to Laura Pollán that she clarify on whose behalf the Ladies in White were speaking.
“‘Laura, are you speaking on behalf of those who want this [the releases in exchange for exile] or on behalf of everyone? (…) It is not a matter of groups, but please, do not divide yourselves, let there be no divisions, but rather, everyone have a single purpose,'” said the cardinal about his request to the Ladies in White.
Ortega told the women that their relatives would soon be released from prison because Raúl Castro had informed him: “Everyone will come out. [Raúl] told me that was his word. And everyone will come out. Not only them, but others from other lists.”
“He was the interlocutor until 2010. Afterwards, our visits to the cardinal really had no result. Everything remained the same, repression, beatings, political prisoners. We would go and talk to him, and nothing, it was all total silence. He remained calm, with everything that was happening,” explains Berta Soler to DIARIO DE CUBA, leader of the Ladies in White.
After Barack Obama’s policy towards Cuba, “the repression intensified, political prisoners continued,” Soler recalls from Havana. “In fact, from 2011 to the present, the number of political prisoners has increased. “Nothing has changed here in Cuba.”
Raúl’s Changes, “Seriously”
Jaime Ortega admits in the recording that he asked Raúl Castro “how to handle” the matter before public opinion and that the dictator responded: “however you want.”
Another issue Ortega refused was to draft a pastoral letter in the same terms as “Love Waits for Everything,” from 1993, which was harshly criticized by the regime.
“Don’t you think it would be time to launch another pastoral letter without mincing words?” asked one of the attending prisoners.
“I believe that every moment has its special response. The moment of all these changes is one of skepticism for many people, of hope for others. I believe that yes, there is an intention for these changes [by Raúl Castro] to be serious,” the cardinal concluded.
Inevitable Contradictions
Suárez, deputy secretary of the COCC, considers that “it is quite common for the gestures and pronouncements of public figures to be interpreted in different ways by all those who approach them,” and he qualifies as “undeniable that the voice and mediation of Cardinal Ortega (…) were decisive for those compatriots to be able to leave prison.”
“There was a part of the opposition, not all, that rejected the intervention of Cardinal Jaime Ortega, and of the Church, in the dialogue process with the Cuban government. Also, within the Cuban government itself, there was resistance to that dialogue with the Church. All those views were inevitable in such a process, but they could not be a reason to deviate from the final objective, which was strictly humanitarian,” explains Orlando Márquez, then spokesman for the Archdiocese of Havana.
In statements to DIARIO DE CUBA, the press officer, who was “present” in the calls to the prisoners, assures that “everyone was grateful for his mediation.”
“Even those who refused to leave Cuba almost all went to see him to thank him personally. Shortly afterwards, the attacks on the action of Cardinal Ortega, and of the Church in general, also from some who were previously grateful, began, and I do not know the reasons. Of course, everyone is free to question or criticize the manner, or a specific act, but generally, they were criticisms without foundation,” Márquez considers.
Ortega, like Bergoglio, paid too little attention to the Biblical injunction against raising scandal. Bad move.