Word: havana
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...President will meet only briefly during John Paul II's emphatically "pastoral" visit to his Cuban flock. The Pope will be center stage, watched by millions on global television, while Fidel will be largely out of sight, watching it all intently from behind the closed door of his Havana office. Who will emerge triumphant...
Still, those who predicted four years ago that Castro's regime was doomed have been proved wrong. The economy has emerged from the abyss. At the depths of the special period, the country had almost no petroleum, electricity, food, transport or production. Today Havana blooms with chicly renovated hotels, neon signs, crowded restaurants and nightclubs. The U.S. dollar has swallowed the Cuban peso. Farmer's markets and mom-and-pop entrepreneurs fuel a production boom of sorts. Cars outnumber bicycles again in Havana, and many of them are 1990s Nissans, not 1950s Chevys. Foreign investors not only share ownership...
...Castro met some liberation-theology priests in Nicaragua and, says Wayne Smith, former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, "decided that social justice, greater equality and caring for the poor were not very different goals from those of the Cuban revolution." So he invited the Pontiff to stop by during a Mexican tour that year, but the "technical layover" Castro offered held no appeal to John Paul...
...Here in Havana, Cubans are of very mixed minds about the Pope's visit. "So many people do not even know who the Pope is," says Enrique Lopez Oliva, a professor of religious history at the University of Havana. Is he a President, a businessman? Is Fidel paying him to come? Even many Catholics are ignorant of the papal biography and doctrinal bent. In a country where abortion ends roughly 40% of all pregnancies and copulation begins in early adolescence, Cubans will be shocked by John Paul II's stern views on sex. His reverence for the family will seem...
Ricardo Alarcon, president of the National Assembly of People's Power, met with TIME correspondents last week in Havana to talk about the Pope's visit, Castro and Cuba. Excerpts: TIME: A lot of Cuban people expect that the Pope's visit will alter U.S. policy toward Cuba. You don't really think that's true...