The pontiff travels to Holguin, the home province of Fidel and Raul Castro. Francis is ending his time in Holguin by blessing Cuba’s fourth-largest city from the Hill of the Cross, a pilgrimage site overlooking the city.
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Pope Francis met Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Sunday hours after warning Cubans to beware the dangers of ideology and the lure of selfishness as their country enters a new era of closer ties with the United States.
Francis, who is the first Latin American pope, addressed Cubans during his homily in their common mother tongue of Spanish.
Cuba’s President Raul Castro greets church officials as he stands next to Pope Francis in the Revolution Palace in Havana, Cuba, September 20, 2015.
“Christians are constantly called to set aside their own wishes and desires, their pursuit of power, and to look instead to those who are most vulnerable”, he told the crowd, speaking beneath a towering sculpture of his fellow Argentine Che Guevara’s iconic silhouette.
Pope Francis presented Fidel Castro with a link to the past Sunday: poems by a Jesuit teacher forced to flee Cuba after his one-time student – the now-ailing Marxist icon – led a revolution. Very moving. Apparently, the two leaders discussed “protecting the environment and the great problems of the contemporary world“, according to Father Lombardi.
Pope Francis flies to eastern Cuba on Monday for the next leg of his pilgrimage after having met with both Raul and Fidel Castro but missing out on an encounter with Cuban dissidents.
Earlier, Francis blessed the Cuban people during Mass in Havana’s Revolution Square.
The pontiff later held evening prayers with a group of priests and spoke to youths at a cultural center. He has helped bring about some of that change through brokering Havana’s talks with Washington.
Marta Beatriz Roque and Miriam Leiva said they received invitations from the office of the papal ambassador in Havana but said they were arrested as they tried to travel to the cathedral. The crowd was not as big as when St John Paul II became the first pope to visit the island in 1998, but it drew people who seemed to genuinely want to be there and listen to Francis’ message.
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“The stewardship of the ecology, about fixing our broken immigration policies in the United States, again about the care of the least – those at the margins and the fourth important theme … is the exercise of religious liberty”, says Vigneron.
