The death of Pope Francis, the first pontiff from Latin America, is being mourned across the continent, but especially in Cuba, despite the communist government’s history of antagonism toward religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular.
Upon hearing the news of the Holy Father’s passing, President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote, “The displays of affection and cordial closeness he conveyed to our compatriots were always reciprocated by the Cuban people.” The headline in the Communist Party’s official newspaper, Granma, read, “Pope Francis and Cuba: A History that Opened Paths,” referring to the Pope’s pivotal role in promoting reconciliation between the Cuban government and the island’s Catholic Church, and between Cuba and the United States.
Church-state relations in Cuba quickly deteriorated into acrimony after the triumph of the revolution in 1959, when the church resisted the socialist trajectory of the revolutionary process. The government responded by closing Catholic schools, expelling foreign clergy, persecuting believers, and formally declaring Cuba an atheist state in the 1976 constitution.
The first green shoots of reconciliation emerged in the 1970s when Pope Paul VI and Pope John-Paul II counseled Catholic hierarchies in communist countries to avoid political confrontations with authorities.
That strategy began to bear fruit in the 1990s when the economic debacle following the fall of the Soviet Union led to a surge in religious observance among the Cuban people, and the government decided to accommodate rather than resist it. The Communist Party’s ban on religious observers was lifted, the constitution was amended to declare the state secular rather than atheist, and Cuba welcomed the first papal a visit from Pope John-Paul II in 1998.
Before he became Pope, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio had a long-standing interest in Cuba. After Pope John Paul II’s visit, the cardinal wrote a short book entitled, Dialogues between John Paul II and Fidel Castro. Its central theme, which would become a central theme of Vatican diplomacy under Francis, was the need for dialogue and mutual understanding between adversaries. Through this “culture of encounter,” he believed, people could come to have compassion for one another, to see each other as children of God.
This was the philosophy he brought to Cuba on his 2015 trip and to his meetings with Raúl and Fidel Castro. His ardent welcome by the Cuban people helped consolidate a constructive, albeit wary, modus vivendi between the government and Church. The party newspaper Granma called it “one of the greatest rapprochements between the Catholic Church and the nation, based on a relationship of mutual respect and sensitivity.”
The result was greater tolerance for the Cuban church and an expanded role for the church’s charitable social work, which the government had previously resisted.
Francis, like his two predecessors, spoke out against the U.S. embargo of Cuba on the grounds that economic embargoes inevitably take the heaviest toll on the most vulnerable people. In 2014, he had an opportunity to put his faith in the culture of encounter into practice.
The United States and Cuba were locked in conflict over the imprisonment of USAID subcontractor Alan Gross in Cuba and the imprisonment of five Cuban intelligence officers in the United States. Two Catholic cardinals with especially close personal relations with the pontiff, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, Archbishop of Havana, and Cardinal Seán O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston, asked Francis to use his moral authority to try to break the deadlock.
In March, the pontiff met with President Barack Obama, urging him to seek reconciliation with Cuba and offering the Holy See’s good offices to help advance the secret dialogue already underway between the two governments.
That summer, with the negotiations stalled, Francis wrote letters to both President Obama and President Castro, imploring them "to resolve humanitarian questions of common interest, including the situation of certain prisoners, in order to initiate a new phase in relations.” The letters helped break the impasse.
When a tentative agreement was finally reached, the Pope invited the U.S. and Cuban negotiators to Rome to finalize the deal. The meeting, facilitated by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, focused on building confidence that both sides would keep their end of the bargain.
''It was less a matter of breaking some substantive logjam but more the confidence of having an external party we could rely on,'' explained a senior U.S. official. The Pope agreed to act as "guarantor" to help overcome the lingering distrust between the two sides.
On December 17, 2014, President Obama and President Castro simultaneously announced their historic agreement, not just to exchange prisoners but to begin normalizing relations between the United States and Cuba after more than sixty years of estrangement. Both presidents thanked Pope Francis for helping bring their dialogue to fruition.
Unfortunately, the rapprochement did not last. President Donald Trump returned to a policy of regime change through “maximum pressure,” rolling back most of Obama’s steps toward normalization. Trump and the Pope clashed openly over a host of issues, especially the treatment of migrants.
Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election seemed to auger well for a resumption of Obama’s Cuba policy. But the Cuban government’s harsh suppression of the nationwide protests on July 11, 2021, caused Biden to freeze relations, insisting that any improvement had to be preceded by the release of some 700 imprisoned protestors. Cuba insisted that any prisoner release would have to be part of a wider deal — a stalemate that offered Pope Francis an opportunity to resurrect the process of engagement.
In late 2021, Francis asked Cardinal O’Malley to once again serve as an interlocutor between the Vatican, Washington, and Havana, carrying messages from the Pope urging Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel to give clemency to non-violent demonstrators and urging the White House to return to the path of reconciliation.
Over the next three years, O’Malley met repeatedly with the senior officials in both capitals, including the presidents, delivering messages from the Holy Father. Perhaps the prospect of a second Trump presidency induced a sense of urgency in both capitals, because it was only after the November 2024 U.S. election that Washington and Havana were able to agree on independent but parallel steps. “The door was closing for an opportunity,” O’Malley reflected.
On January 14, 2025, The White House announced major policy changes undertaken “as part of an understanding with the Catholic Church under the leadership of Pope Francis.” Biden rescinded Trump’s 2017 presidential directive overturning Obama’s policy of engagement; removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of international terrorism; and suspended Title III of the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act allowing U.S. citizens who lost property in Cuba to sue in U.S. federal court foreign firms making use of that property.
The next day, the Cuban government announced that would free 553 prisoners at the behest of the Pope "in the spirit of the Ordinary Jubilee of the year 2025 declared by His Holiness.”
Unfortunately, Pope Francis’ second effort to nurture a culture of encounter between the United States and Cuba was cut short by President Trump, who, within days of taking office, reversed all of Biden’s actions. The Cubans, for their part, followed through by releasing the 553 prisoners, as promised.
All the leaders of the Catholic Church who played such central roles in fostering a U.S.-Cuban rapprochement have now left the stage of global diplomacy. Cuba’s Cardinal Ortega passed away in 2019. Cardinal O’Malley retired as Archbishop last year and is too old to participate in the upcoming conclave to select the new pontiff. With Francis’ passing, the poor have lost a champion and the world has lost a moral force for peace and reconciliation.
At a moment when rapprochement between the United States and Cuba seems as distant as ever, those who support a relationship based on mutual understanding, respect, and compassion can take inspiration from the indefatigable spirit of Pope Francis and his commitment to a culture of encounter.
