HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuban President Raul Castro held a rare meeting yesterday with leaders of an increasingly active Roman Catholic Church to discuss international and domestic issues, the official media reported yesterday. The meeting followed Cardinal Jaime Ortega’s successful mediation between Communist authorities and female relatives of imprisoned dissidents earlier this month.
That resulted in the group, known as the Ladies in White, resuming Sunday marches along a main Havana avenue free from harassment by government supporters.
“During the meeting various issues of mutual interest were analyzed, in particular the favorable development of relations between the Catholic Church and Cuban state and the current international and domestic situation,” the official media said in a communique.
It was accompanied by photographs of Castro with Ortega and the head of the Catholic Bishops Conference, Archbishop Dionisio Garcia.
The Vatican’s foreign minister, Archbishop Dominique Memberti, is due to visit the island next month amid increasing economic difficulties and international attention on human rights abuses in Cuba. Dissident hunger striker Orlando Zapata Tamayo died in February and another, Guillermo Farinas Hernandez, has been hospitalized since March.
Memberti is expected to press authorities to release political prisoners whom the government brands as mercenaries and subversives in the pay of the United States.
