Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...White House this week. The State Department, as well as many Congressmen, remains opposed to any open U.S. aid to the rebels. The drawbacks: it could link the U.S. to the government of South Africa, which has been covertly allied with Savimbi, and scuttle efforts to force Cuba to remove the 30,000 troops it has in Angola...
...expelled bishops and priests, eliminated church schools, made it difficult for practicing Christians to get government jobs and even discouraged the observance of Christmas because it impeded the sugar- cane harvest. Pronouncements on faith, however, surface regularly in Fidel and Religion: Conversations with Friar Betto, just published in Cuba with Castro's own imprimatur. It is proving to be an instant hit: when the 379-page volume went on sale in Havana bookstores three weeks ago, lines of purchasers stretched for blocks...
...attack the church early in his regime? Because, he answers, it harbored counterrevolutionaries. He insists that Cuba never tortured or murdered priests and did not close a single church. Church-state relations have improved somewhat in recent years, and Castro even fancies that it is time for Pope John Paul II ("a noteworthy politician") to visit Cuba. Of this newfound cordiality, one Western diplomat in Havana observes, "Castro can afford to be magnanimous; religion today in Cuba is hardly a threat." In fact, Catholicism was never deeply rooted in the country. Today there are perhaps 80,000 active Catholics...
Friar Betto is a sympathetic, perhaps even credulous, interviewer. The author told TIME that nothing Castro says in the book "qualifies him as a heretic." | The friar also regards Cuba as "far more just" than most of the world's nations because it supposedly has eliminated poverty. He explains that he did not press Castro about such sensitive subjects as discrimination against religious believers in government hiring and in universities because "I didn't want to interrupt him with questions that would put him on the defensive...
gence officials, however, contended last week that guns retrieved from the palace bore serial numbers that identified them as part of a shipment that moved from North Viet Nam via Cuba to Nicaragua and on to Colombia...