Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega will celebrate his 75th birthday on Tuesday.
And, as required by Catholic Church law, he has offered his resignation as archbishop of Havana.
Most analysts agree the Vatican is highly unlikely to accept the resignation of a prelate who guides the most powerful non-government organization in Cuba, officially atheist 1962-1991 and still communist-ruled.
Raúl Castro’s government has allowed Ortega to build a new seminary, launch a business school and run charity programs that include homes for the elderly and soup kitchens for the poor.
Ortega also helped carry out Castro’s decision to free more than 100 jailed dissidents, and last year mediated a halt to brutal attacks by state-organized mobs on the Ladies in White — female relatives of political prisoners.
Yet critics say Ortega has only weakly denounced human rights abuses and tried to hold back Catholics who criticize the government, like the Rev. Jose Conrado Rodríguez and fired magazine editor Dagoberto Valdés.
They also complain that he helped Castro get rid of the former political prisoners because all but 12 went straight from prison to Spain in what they denounced as a “forced exile.” Ortega insists they left voluntarily.
Valdés and others predict Pope Benedict XVI will not accept Ortega’s resignation now, at a time when the church faces “favorable circumstances” and is preparing for the 400th anniversary next year of Cuba’s patron saint, Our Lady of Charity.
Ortega also is in good health — health concerns being the main reason for the church rule pushing retirement from pastoral duties at age 75, Valdes said by telephone from his home in the western province of Pinar del Rio.
His resignation as archbishop may be accepted — he will remain a cardinal — in two years, perhaps after a papal visit for the Lady of Charity events, church officials said. And it’s way too early to speculate on a successor.
GAINING GROUND
But even Valdes, who has clashed with Ortega in the past, acknowledges that the Cuban church has gained much ground since the end of Soviet subsidies in the early 1990s plunged the island into chaos.
“Communism was not working, people needed something to believe in and the church took on some of the state functions,” said Uva de Aragon, former head of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.
Pope John Paul II’s visit to Cuba in 1998 also unleashed a spike in church attendance, marriages and baptisms. And while attendance dropped off in recent years, the church now runs a variety of social welfare programs.
Nuns run nursing homes, and some churches send parishioners to visit the elderly and disabled at home. Others run free food programs and drug dispensaries for adults, and religion, computer and other classes for children.
The new home for the San Carlos and San Ambrosio seminary inaugurated in November was the first such construction permitted since 1959, and priests have been given more access to government-run TV and radio.
Church publications also have run essays praising or criticizing the radical economic reforms that Castro has proposed, including a significant opening for small private businesses and deep cuts in central government controls.
The church also joined with a Spanish university in a Havana program that offers a master’s in business administration, and organized classes for the new entrepreneurs on how to keep accounting ledgers. It is also exploring the possibility of arranging micro credits for start-ups.
That’s a massive improvement from 1961, when Fidel Castro expelled hundreds of priests and nuns —13 on the ship Covadonga alone —closed all church schools and seized almost all of their buildings.
The Villa Marista state security jail was a boys’ school run by the Marist Brothers. And Ortega spent 1966-1967 in one of the forced labor camps for men “unfit” for military service, like practicing Catholics and homosexuals.
“I understand the frustrations of the many people who want a stronger confrontation with the government,” said de Aragon. “But I don’t criticize because so much has improved, and we may see only the tip of the iceberg.”
But others compare Ortega unfavorably with Catholic leaders in Poland, Nicaragua, Venezuela and El Salvador who have been much more aggressive in their demands for human and civil rights.
“He didn’t do much for human rights or political prisoners, and what he did was late and on Vatican orders,” said Andy Gomez, senior fellow at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies.
Ortega’s spokesman at the Havana archdiocese, Orlando Marquez, said the cardinal already had submitted the resignation required by his 75th birthday but declined to provide more substantive comments for this story.
NAMED IN ‘94
When John Paul II named Ortega as cardinal in 1994, Vatican officials told a journalist that the pope wanted “to strengthen the church in areas where it has suffered from interference or persecution by local authorities.”
Yet Catholic activists in Cuba have often accused him of timidity in his dealings with Fidel Castro and younger brother Raúl, who succeeded him in 2006.
Ortega reportedly pushed Valdes to tone down the criticisms of the government he published in Vitral, a Pinar del Rio diocesan magazine. He resigned as editor and Vitral closed after a dispute with the local bishop.
The cardinal also kept his distance from Oswaldo Payá, who heads the illegal Christian Liberation Movement. Payá’s Varela Project gathered 25,000 signatures demanding a
referendum on the communist system.
The Rev. Rodríguez was transferred recently from Cuba’s second largest city to a tiny rural church. He had criticized the Castros and complained the church had abandoned its “prophetic” duty — denouncing injustices.
And when the Ladies in White urged him in September to help halt a government crackdown on new dissident protests in eastern Cuba, he replied that the church opposed all violence but issued a thinly varnished warning.
Anything “that could affect peaceful coexistence and upset the well-being of the nation will not find support among those of us who have a Christian vision of the world,” said a statement issued by Marquez.
Valdes said that whatever the praise or criticisms of Ortega, the Catholic Church has been helping Cubans achieve a better life and remains committed to that goal.
“The Vatican takes a longer and higher view than any other institution,” he said. “It has all the time in the world, beyond any temporary rain showers.”