Cuba’s foreign minister said his government was looking forward to welcoming Pope Benedict XVI and exchanging points of view with him, even after the pope used his in-flight news conference to criticize Marxist ideology.
Bruno Rodriguez, the foreign minister of Cuba’s communist government, was asked about the pope’s remarks March 23 during the opening of the Havana press center for the papal visit. “We are looking forward to an exchange of ideas” during the pope’s visit March 26-28, he said. The Cuban people have developed their government over a long history of “struggles for freedom and against slavery,” he said. The struggles include what “Pope John Paul II described as unjust and ethically unacceptable economic measures imposed from the outside,” Rodriguez said, referring to the U.S. economic embargo, which began in 1962. “The social project of Cuba … is open to an exchange of ideas. It is a democratic and coherent social project,” Rodriguez said. “Freedom is one of the supreme values of our culture and our people — the freedom and dignity of the people,” he said. But Pope Benedict, during his flight March 23 from Italy to Mexico, responded to a question about the arrest of Cuban dissidents by saying, the “church is always on the side of freedom, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion. Marxist ideology as it was conceived no longer responds to the truth today, we can no longer respond this way to construct a society,” the pope said on the plane.
HAVANA (CNS)