CUBA
Cuba's Catholic Church trying to fill gaps in social safety net
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com
Havana retiree Maria Antonia confesses that she would be starving
without the free lunches doled out by her neighborhood Catholic Church.
The 69-year-old widow has a $12-a-month pension that barely covers six
to eight days worth of food per month, and she has no relatives abroad
who can send her a few extra dollars.
"A free lunch is a life-saver when a pound of pork costs more than $1,"
says Maria Antonia. "The church to me is not just a temple or a mass. It
is a way of surviving."
As Cuban ruler Raúl Castro cuts government subsidies on the food and
health sectors in an attempt to boost the all-but-stalled economy, the
Catholic Church is trying to fill the growing gaps in the island's
unraveling social welfare net.
With millions in aid from Catholic exiles and groups abroad, parishes
are increasingly running soup kitchens and health and education programs
and working with troubled families and HIV-positive Cubans.
"The needs are growing, and the state has limited resources," said
Maritza Sánchez, director of Caritas Cubana, the island's branch of the
worldwide Catholic relief, development and social service organization.
The good relations between Castro and Cardinal Jaime Ortega also have
cleared the way for improved cooperation on issues like humanitarian
programs and human rights — like the release of about 125 political
prisoners in 2010 and 2011.
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Even after Fidel Castro declared the government atheist, seized church
properties and expelled hundreds of priests and nuns in the early 1960s,
he allowed some Catholic religious orders to run several hospitals and
nursing homes.
Among them are a psychiatric hospital and the Santovenia and Golden Age
homes for the elderly in Havana, plus the San Juan de Dios hospital and
the Padre Olallo nursing home in eastern Camaguey. Nuns also staff the
San Lazaro Hospital for lepers in Havana, although the government owns it.
Church-run nursing homes are so well regarded that they have unofficial
waiting lists for admissions, said one parish volunteer. Some elderly
seeking quick admission have even offered to turn over their homes to
the church or lay nurses.
For decades, Cuban officials were hyper-sensitive to any public word on
the church's humanitarian work, apparently concerned it could cast a
shadow on their boasts about the Castro revolution's advances in the
social welfare sector.
But the Cuban government began to allow the church a broader field of
action after the Soviet Union's massive subsidies to the island ended
and hunger spread over the island. In 1991, it gave Caritas permission
to open the local branch.
Today, the need for the church's charity work is growing again, with
food prices rising nearly 20 percent last year alone after Raúl Castro
slashed food subsidies and imports. Health spending also dropped by 7.7
percent in 2011.
Relations between church relief agencies and the government now "appear
to be improving. They are less tense," said Mary De Lorey, Latin America
and Caribbean representative for the U.S.-based Catholic Relief Services
(CRS).
Most large parishes now offer free meals several days per week, classes
in computers and languages like English and French, as well as lectures
on Cuban history and tutoring on business skills like accounting,
according to church activists.
Some state-run enterprises have even been sending their employees to the
business-related courses in his parish, said Enrique López Oliva, a
journalist and retired church historian who lives in Havana.
Caritas Cubana also helps children with Down syndrome, at-risk children
and their parents, and Cubans who are HIV-positive or have AIDS, Maritza
Sánchez told El Nuevo Herald in a telephone interview.
But the government's belt-tightening is falling hardest on older Cubans
like Maria Antonia, a retired Justice Ministry economist who asked that
her surname not be published because she makes a few extra pesos a month
on the black market.
"If one has to depend on retirement benefits to make ends meet these
days, you might as well shoot yourself," she added in a phone
conversation from Havana.
Cuban pensions are always meager and although health care is officially
free, many medicines and supplies, from needles to tooth filling
materials, can be found only on the expensive black market.
Several parishes across the island's 11 dioceses have volunteers who
deliver food to the elderly or disabled shut-ins and bathe them, and
other parishioners can even clean their laundry.
Volunteer doctors make house calls to check on the oldsters, and
parishes notify each other when one of their neighbors — whether they
are practicing Catholics or not — cannot find a badly needed medicine,
said one physician.
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Like most of the other churches in Cuba, the Catholics' humanitarian
work on the island is financed almost entirely from abroad, through many
channels large and small that make it impossible to estimate the total
value.
Caritas Cubana received cash and goods worth almost $1.9 million in
donations in 2010, the majority of it from its counterparts in Spain,
Germany and Switzerland, said Sánchez. It has 72 full time staffers and
more than 3,200 volunteers across the island to serve more than 28,000
adults and children in nearly 5,000 families.
Friends of Caritas Cuba in Boston, where Cardinal Sean Patrick has long
been active in Cuba issues, sent the island branch 23 percent of the
donations it received in 2010, and CRS accounted for about 21 percent,
Sánchez added.
De Lorey said CRS' Cuba program averages $160,000-$170,000 a year,
mostly to train Caritas Cubana staffers and volunteers. It also sends
the island two or three shipments of donated medical supplies a year,
although that aid spikes during emergencies such as hurricanes, she noted.
CRS' efforts in Cuba are narrow compared to other countries, De Lorey
added, because in most other nations it can assist in areas such as
education, agricultural development, microenterprise development and
micro-financing.
Cardinal Tim Dolan of New York also has pushed his archdiocese to help
Cuba, and other U.S. dioceses and parishes have their own direct
relations with counterparts on the island. Indianapolis and Camagüey,
for instance, are "sister diocese."
The U.S. Knights of Columbus reportedly financed the construction of a
new home for the San Carlos and San Ambrosio Seminary, a 55-acre
facility near Havana equipped with computers.
The Miami-based nuns from the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de
Paul order say they send to Cuba an average of one shipping container
every one or two months loaded with medical supplies, used clothes and
non-perishable items.
And Catholic exiles who travel to Cuba say they often take cash and
whatever other supplies they can manage to their former home parishes,
to sidestep any government controls on the humanitarian aid.
When former Santiago Archbishop Pedro Meurice died in Miami last year,
American Eagle airlines donated one of the planes that flew his casket,
relatives and friends to the island, said Vivian Mannerud, a veteran of
the Cuba travel industry.
Mannerud said her company, Airline Brokers, also has delivered to the
Cuban church, free of charge, items such as food, bibles, rosaries,
adult and baby diapers and wheelchairs and other medical equipment.
Other assistance reaches the island from other Catholic humanitarian
organizations, such as Adveniat in Germany and Misereor and Bread of the
World in France, according to church activists in Havana.
The church assistance programs do not always run smoothly.
The Cuban government must pre-approve the packing list for any inbound
shipment, and has impounded boxes — usually those rushed in after
hurricanes — that contain messages they found offensive, such as "From
Exile."
Parishes can no longer maintain the pharmaceutical dispensaries that
once drew in many Cubans looking for hard-to-find medicines. One source
said Cuban officials told her they feared that the donated medicines
could contain poison or a virus.
Under U.S. embargo rules, Caritas Cubana can deliver U.S. shipments of
medical supplies to government hospitals — so long as it can certify the
supplies are not diverted for use on government or Communist Party
officials, among other requirements.
Several veterans of the church assistance program strongly denied past
reports that Castro government agencies and officials at times had
demanded a percentage of a shipment before allowing the church to
distribute the remainder.
"Well, sometimes the work can be difficult and complicated," Sánchez
said. "But there's a need that is growing and that we have to at least
try to alleviate."
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/03/14/v-fullstory/2694083/cubas-catholic-church-trying-to.html
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