Is there Church History in Revolutionary Cuba?: Accessing and Analysing Cuban Catholic Sources

Introduction: Cuban Catholic History as We Know ItWhen talking about church history in Cuba, one usually refers to the history of the Catholic Church. When Pope Francis visited Cuba in September 2015, he proclaimed Cuba to be an intrinsically Catholic country - Catholic by history and by heart. In the twenty-first century, the Catholic Church remains the most organised and widespread Christian denomination in Cuba. The most recent statistics by the Central Office of Church Statistics of the Catholic Church from December 2013 estimate that 60.5 per cent of the Cuban population are Catholic.1 While the non-Catholic Christian denominations, namely the protestants churches and the pentecostal movement, remain rather scattered and small in size, the most significant religious tradition confronting Catholicism is santeria, even when merging with popular practices of Catholicism. However, even if Cuba is Catholic by history, the contemporary Catholic history seems to be hard to reach when narrating history in Cuba and even harder to research with access to sources of history. Although Catholicism of the colonial period is both documented and researched, the contemporary history of Cuban Catholicism, dating to the revolution of 1959 and everything since is still a largely unstudied landscape - both on the island and in the international field of Cuban studies.For the Cuban public, only a few, although well-known and extensive works examine the history of Catholicism in Cuba. Regarding the colonial period, on the street markets and in book stores of Havana one may purchase publications for example by Cuban historians such as Eduardo Torres-Cuevas2 and Rigoberto Segreo Ricardo,3 introducing centuries of church history in Cuba. Within the Catholic Church in Cuba, a publication entitled Historia de la Iglesia Catolica en Cuba by Ramon Suarez Polcari (2003), the current chancellor of the Archdiocese of Havana, seems to be considered one of the contemporary key pieces for the history of the modern Catholic Church in Cuba. Polcari's work, extensive although scarcely available in Cuba, introduces in great detail the key instances, people and events of institutional Catholicism in Cuba from Columbus to Castro, but not any further than the eve of the revolution. Two of the few pieces on the Catholic Church in the revolution sold in Cuba are the well-known and well-read conversations of Fidel Castro and Frei Betto (1985), Fidel y la Religion. Conversaciones con Frei Betto, and a research by Aurelio Alonso Tejada (1999), Iglesia y politica en Cuba revolucionaria. The most recent publication concerning the contemporary Catholic Church in Cuba is the interviewbased biography of Mons. Carlos Manuel de Cespedes (Baez and De la Hoz 2015). In the book Monsenor Carlos Manuel se confiesa, the prominent Cuban Catholic figure discusses both his personal history and the history of the church in the revolution with Cuban journalists Luis Baez and Pedro De la Hoz.In international academic studies on contemporary Cuba, the Catholic Church has been addressed in numerous acclaimed works, but usually as a singular topic of a larger entity. Only a few scholarly monographs such as Between God and the Party. Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Cuba by John M. Kirk (1989) illustrate the history of the Catholic Church in the revolution as an independent topic. Dating back to the early stages of analysing the Cuban revolution, Leslie Dewart (1963) was among the first scholars to analyse the position of the Catholic Church in Cuba in his monograph entitled Cuba. Church and Crisis. Christianity and Politics in the Cuban Revolution. Apart from these few extensive works, the Catholic Church, Catholicism and Christian religion have been analysed as mere dimensions of the revolution and the Cuban society. For example, sociologist Silvia Pedraza addresses Catholicism in her work Political Disaffection in Cuba's Revolution and Exodus (2005). Even though the number of published monographs on the topic remains small, there are articles with a specific focus on the topic. …