Raúl Castro’s Papal Publicity Stunt

Cuban dictator Raúl Castro flew to the Vatican, met privately with Pope Francis, and says he’s returning to church.

“I promise to go to all his Masses, and with satisfaction,” he said after the meeting on television. “I read all the speeches of the pope, his commentaries, and if the pope continues this way, I will go back to praying and go back to the church. I’m not joking.”

Fat chance.

The man is 83 years old and has been an atheist and a communist since the Season One premiere of Leave it to Beaver. His regime once outlawed religion entirely and to this day has its boot on the neck of the island’s priests.

There’s always a chance, I suppose, that, unlike Christopher Hitchens, he’s changing his heart and mind about God near the end of his life. It’s far more likely, however, that he’s trying to burnish his image abroad now that the United States is normalizing relations.

Even if he goes back to church every Sunday and starts praying in front of the cameras, few will believe he’s sincere. Politicians do this sort of thing all the time. Does anyone seriously believe that America’s Congress critters are even half as churchy in real life as they appear? Raúl is a lower form of life even than they are. He’s only a “politician” when he leaves the island and hobnobs with his betters. At home he helms a police state.

At least he got to see Europe with his own eyes when he flew to the Vatican. Italy is hardly the most high-functioning and prosperous nation in Europe—it looks and feels like Greece or even Egypt compared with Switzerland and Germany—but compared with Cuba it’s Canada.

Cuba’s natural beauty is undeniable, and it’s easy to see Havana’s former grandeur through the rot and decay, but even the refurbished part of the capital in the tourist quarter looks and feels surreal and blank. It’s like a Disneyfied version of Cuba. Clean and well-maintained, to be sure, and pleasant enough on the surfect, but there’s no real economy there aside from some token high-end restaurants for tourists that locals can’t afford to eat in on their 20-dollars a month Maximum Wage. 

Some of your friends have been to Cuba, I know, and some of them say it’s great. It can be great if you stay inside the tourist bubble, but leaving that bubble and interacting with the rest of Havana is like getting thumped in the stomach by a cop wielding a truncheon. More than half the capital’s population lives on a ration card and a salary smaller than a child’s allowance in an urban disaster area that looks like it was bombed during a war. 

Rome had to have made an impression on Raúl Castro. He knows what a nation with a market economy looks like, and that’s good. He can’t possibly go home and believe his own propaganda about “socialism,” which in Cuba is actually communism, but he hasn’t believed that nonsense for years anyway. Now that his more-hardline brother Fidel is out of the picture—is he still even alive, or is it Weekend at Bernie’s down there?—Raúl has implemented microcapitalist reforms and will likely continue moving, though perhaps at glacial speed, toward a Latin American version of the Chinese and Vietnamese model.

He should aim for the Chilean model, but he won’t, not even after visiting Europe. Seeing what a properly functioning country looks like and feels like isn’t enough for the power mad. North Korea’s Jim Jong Un went to school in Switzerland. He knows damn well what a civilized country looks like and can’t possibly believe that the prison state he inherited is doing the best it possibly can. He hasn’t been to Seoul, but surely he’s seen pictures on the Internet and can contrast his vibrant neighbor with the soul-crushing totalitarian anthill of Pyongyang. Absolute power, though, corrupts absolutely, and the tyranny of the Kim family probably even creeps out the Castros at this point.

It’s not entirely meaningless that Raúl is telling Westerners what they want to hear. It’s cynical, sure, and it won’t amount to much in the end, but unlike the boy king of the underworld over in Pyongyang, he seems to be tiring of his isolation.