Re: Where is the Theology of Liberation in Revolutionary Cuba?

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    WARNING: This post contains strong language, and even stronger truths,
about religions in Cuba in general and Papist scum, I mean the Holy Roman
Catholic Church, in particular. Parental discretion is advised.
Children --whatever their age-- who still believe in Santa Claus, the Three
Kings, the Tooth Fairy, the Pope in Rome or God in Heaven are urged NOT to
read this.

*  *  *

    Well, as someone who lived through the period, even as a child, I can
suggest a more practical reason why there was no "liberation theology" in
Cuba.

    And that is because all the papist skypilots and would-be eunuchs of
both sexes in the papist "religious orders" were preaching --and
practicing-- subjugation-to-American-imperialism-and-the-almighty-dollar
theology. Like the man said, you can't serve God and mammon.

    To write about the Papist church in Cuba as an academic and "forget" to
mention operation "Pedro Pan," and the fact that the big majority of the
Papist preachers, and the Catholic Church hierarchy as a whole, collaborated
with the CIA and the counterrevolution, that "Cristo Rey" was the main
rallying cry of many in the bourgeois counterrevolution, and how even today
those papist priests that haven't yet become literal worm farms are still
happily collaborating with the gusano mafia in Miami, where they wound up
following their "flock," is precisely the kind of thing that reminds me why
I should thank God every day that I get to slave for TW (& soon AOL) for a
living instead of preaching for the papacy in some "institution of higher
learning."

    You can't be more CLUELESS than to write about why there is no
"liberation theology" in Cuba and "forget" such simple things as, that while
tens of thousands of idealistic teenagers were abandoning their comfortable
Havana homes to go into the countryside to help peasants learn how to read,
the Church was denouncing this as an attack on the family and the virtue of
adolescent girls and boys; that 15,000 children were ripped from their
homes, their parents stampeded by CIA-fabricated and Church-circulated
"official" and "secret" documents that children would be "nationalized" just
like American corporate properties had been, and would be taken from their
parent's home at the age of three (to be ground into sausage and canned to
pay Russia for weapons, the preachers said); that the CIA mercenary invasion
was blessed and accompanied by a pack of sniveling Papist chaplains; that
the Church never saw its way clear to making even a paper statement against
the 20,000 murders carried out by Batista and his gang but as soon as the
revolution started to do justice unto the torturers and assassins of the
Batista dictatorships, these Pharisees in clerical drag and moral castrati
lifted their voices onto heaven pleading for "mercy" for the butchers -- and
unto Washington pleading for an invasion against the Cuban people.

    And it isn't a historical question. Show me the Papal statement
demanding that the Cuban people be allowed to try the terrorist Posada
Carriles for blowing a Cuban civilian airliner full of teenagers out of the
sky. Until then, let's have no more "learned" bullshit "analysis" of why the
Cuban people do not want to make common cause with scum like the Papist
priests, bishops and cardinals.

    Oh yes. Today the revolution is very polite. It is downright
reverential. But don't kid yourselves. There are more than a few people in
Cuba whose idea of heaven is to see the last capitalist hung with the
disemboweled entrails of the last priest.

    The rebels who came down from the mountains 42 years ago were, as we say
in Spanish, humble people, poor people. Many wore "escapularios" around
their necks, convinced it helped ward of the tyrant's bullets and the
Americans' bombs. They were not anti-clerical, they were not anti-Papist,
they were not atheists. But over the next few years the cassocked Cossacks
of American imperialism used their pulpits as barricades and their Churches
and Monasteries as armories.

    NOW the Church is oh so sorry, and oh so respectful of the "temporal"
authorities, render unto Caesar and all that. And history has been such that
it hasn't been politic for the comrades to spit in their faces. So be it.

    But, here, entre nous, let's cut through the diplomatic bullshit. The
son of the carpenter and his message, expressing plebeian contempt for
imperial masters and the hatred of the exploited against those who rob them
every day, is not the issue. The issue in Cuba was a Church of the rich, by
the rich and for the rich, and most especially for the rich imperial
masters, against a revolution of, by and for the poor. It's as simple as
that. You were either WITH the "godless communists" and the right to read,
and to have food on the table and a floor in your hut, or you were on the
side of God, Religion and the CIA.

    If 50 or 100 years from now, historians looking back wonder why the
Cuban revolutionaries were staunchly, even overly anticlerical and overly
militant in their atheism, they will not rush to condemn a small and poor
nation which, while confronting the mightiest empire the world had ever
known, still had to deal with these fifth columnists and traitors in their
midst. There will be no condemnation but rather wonder that the revolution
did not deal with ALL these imperialist agents the same way it dealt with so
many others, by irrigating the tree of liberty with their blood.

José


----- Original Message -----
From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, December 29, 2000 10:48 AM
Subject: Where is the Theology of Liberation in Revolutionary Cuba?


Where is the Theology of Liberation in Revolutionary Cuba?

Stefanie A. Swenko
Department of Religious Studies
Center for Latin American Studies
University of Pittsburgh


Introduction

The Theology of Liberation is a doctrine that was quite popular among
the countries of Latin America in the late 1960s and throughout the
1980s.  As it was born out of the combination of Christian teachings
and Marxism, it would seem probable to encounter such a doctrine in a
country that embraced socialism, such as Cuba.  However, as we shall
see, Cuba is the one country in which surprisingly there is no
Liberation Theology to speak of.  How can this be?