Havana/The Conference of Catholic Bishops of Cuba (COCC) has had to look back and recover wishes that it already requested in its 2020 Christmas message and are still waiting. “Good news for Cubans would be that things change for the better and in peace… that the stress of getting food becomes a peaceful sharing of daily bread with the family… that the announced readjustment of the national economy, far from increasing the concerns of many, helps everyone to be able to support their family with a decent job, with sufficient wages and with the always necessary social justice…”, he then requested, a text that he recovered this Sunday when making public his message of this Jubilee Year, in which he called “all Christians and Cubans to be ‘sowers of hope’, inspiring and ordering their actions towards the construction of a new Cuba.
The bishops, who begin by remembering those who suffered the scourge of Hurricane Melissa in the east of the Island, have invited “to dialogue, to shake hands, to build bridges instead of walls” and to advocate for the “united” family. The text, published on the COCC website and its social networks, emphasizes that the Christmas message is also a call “to forget offenses, silence resentments and call each other brother to, together, build a better Cuba.”
The Christmas message is also a call “to forget offenses, silence resentments and call each other brother so, together, we can build a better Cuba.”
Thus, they remember everything they already said in 2020 and consider that it retains “its relevance five years later.” Among the recovered parts of that document is also the demand that “we Cubans do not have to look outside the country for what we must find within; that we do not have to wait for them to give us from above what we owe and we can build ourselves from below… that all blockades, external and internal, cease, and give way to the creative initiative, to the liberation of the productive forces and laws that favor the initiative of each Cuban, so that each one will feel and will be able to be the protagonist of his life project and, in this way, the Nation will advance towards integral human development.”
Furthermore, the bishops say that “today other good wishes could be added, which we need and hope for. May the time to make them come true not continue to be delayed, with everyone’s efforts.”
The message alludes unequivocally to the serious economic crisis that affects the country and the effects it has produced, including mass migration, just one day before it is celebrated, today December 22, the day of Saint Francis Javier Cabrini, “patron saint of immigrants, example of faith and charity without borders. Her life reminds us that true love is expressed in concrete works and that hope can cross oceans,” the COCC recalled this Monday.
In her post, where she briefly reviews the life of the missionary, who cared for Italian immigrants in the United States in schools, hospitals and orphanages, she points out that this saint was “spiritual mother of those who sought a dignified future.” “In times of migration and global challenges, their example invites us to open our hearts and hands to those seeking a home and an opportunity,” they say.
“In times of migration and global challenges, their example invites us to open our hearts and hands to those seeking a home and an opportunity,” they say.
Christmas comes for the Cuban Catholic Church this year with the very recent loss of Héctor Luis Lucas Peña Gómez, bishop emeritus of Holguín. The prelate, who died at the age of 96 last Thursday, was one of the signatories of the pastoral Love waits for everythingone of the most significant documents of the Church in Cuba and its farewell took place in the Cathedral of San Isidoro, in a body mass presided over by the archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, Monsignor Dionisio García Ibáñez.
The Holguin poet Ghabriel Pérez shared a text with this newspaper – published this Friday– in which he remembered Peña and wondered the reason for the police presence at his funeral. “In this farewell I cannot miss my annoyance at having seen so many police, on every side street from the Cathedral to the cemetery, and so many motorcycles and chasers, in custody of what? Just a few weeks ago a similar pilgrimage took place for the death of the priest José Necuse and there was not a single police officer in custody. Evidently, my dearest Peña, you activated the springs of a faith with pure rebellious roots,” he wrote.
