Throughout five centuries of Havana’s existence, the Church has played a relevant role at the social level, both in terms of the construction and support of charitable works, as well as in the field of human promotion, either in the field of institutional education or through the promotion of intellectual and political initiatives that benefit the collective. This work has sometimes been carried out with the support of the official authorities and in others despite their indifference or hostility, as history shows.
It should be remembered that the Spanish kings since the time of the conquest obtained the right of the Holy See to be patrons of the Church throughout their empire in exchange for assuming the mission of evangelizing the inhabitants of the colonies. So the Crown handled ecclesiastical rents at its discretion, designated the bishops as the one who grants public office and subjected the ecclesiastical authorities to fidelity to the civil authorities who, on behalf of the monarch, held this Board of Trustees.
Such prerogatives that would have forced the viceroys or governors of the colonies to build temples, equip them with sacred ornaments, and found institutions necessary for the public good actually produced the opposite effect. The management of tithing was done arbitrarily and generated many lawsuits between bishops and rulers and if the Church had valuable social initiatives from an early age, it was more due to the virtue of certain mitredos, assisted by priests, religious and secular associations, than to the support of colonial officials.
The town of San Cristóbal de La Habana, founded in 1514 on the south coast of the territory and permanently moved in 1519 next to the Port of Carenas, experienced from very early on this conflict situation. While the Ordinances provided for a Plaza de Armas to be drawn in each foundation and one side of it was intended for the construction of the Parish Major, for more than five decades the main temple of the village was a mere bohio, until the legacy of one of the main neighbors, Juan de Rojas, allowed to build a more dignified one , albeit very modest, in 1574.
It is true that this primitive settlement was very poor and that, a few decades after it was founded, its population was drastically reduced because it preferred to emigrate to the conquest of the Mainland, which promised greater wealth, but still, governors did nothing in favor of the quality of life of the residents. If there was anything in teaching it was due to the establishment there of the Augustinians’ Fathers in 1588 and the construction of the first convent of San Francisco three years later.
Public health care had a similar origin. In 1593, an individual of which very little is known, Sebastian de la Cruz, arrived at the port, after surviving a shipwreck in front of the beach of Bacuranao, according to tradition was Franciscan tertiary. He settled in a kind of hut next to the hermitage of San Felipe and Santiago and in that miserly home he welcomed the sick poor he found. Some had him as crazy and some were for saints, but he had to sustain his initiative with few alms. Upon his death, which occurred in 1598, the Habanero lobby took over that “institution”, but it only began to have dignity and stability from 1603, when the Hospital Order of St. John of God took care of it and held it, against wind and tide, until the nineteenth century.1
Something similar happened with the first women’s hospital on the island, which began to rise in 1668 with a legacy left by the priest Nicolás Estévez Borges. It had to be re-edified in the following century and sustained with ecclesial funds throughout its history. In 1910 he moved from his headquarters in front of the port, in Paula and Homeless, for a more appropriate building in the Viper, where he still serves as a home for the elderly today.
Even in social problems that are now a little difficult to understand, the Church had to offer certain remedies. During the colonial period the families were very extensive and even the wealthiest could not always offer a suitable dowry for each of the daughters they had. Because a woman was not considered decent to work outside the home, or to marry someone of inferior social status, the multiplication of females in households, without employment or resources to support them, was avoided, intended for religious life. This explains why the neighbors of San Cristobal enthusiastically supported the creation of convents of closure as the fate of the single girls, first that of Santa Clara (1644) and then those of Santa Catalina (1701) and Santa Teresa (1702).
In 1687 Bishop Diego Evelino de Compostela took over the Cuban headquarters, who had a fruitful job during the seventeen years of his government: he founded the College of San Francisco de Sales (1688) for the education of girls and the following year the Colegio San Ambrosio, for boys, which would be the seed of the future Seminary College of San Carlos and San Ambrosio. He founded the Hospital de Convalecientes de Belén, which the Bethymites took over since 1704 and which at the end of the century also housed a children’s school that, according to the 1793 Guide of Outsiders, taught to read, write and count, “with more than 600 boys, where everything is supplied to those who are poor”.2 Also, concerned about the tragedy of newborns.”2 Also, concerned about the tragedy of newborns. , abandoned by his parents for being illegitimate, or lacking the means to sustain them, began in 1702 the foundation of the Royal Cradle House, which death did not allow him to conclude and was brought to fruition by his successor Friar Gerónimo Valdés in 1710, so those received in it were baptized with the surname of the prelated.
Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, which for us is not yet The Century of Lights as in Europe, arise in Havana, thanks to the initiative and the Ecclesial Board of Trustees, the main teaching institutions of the country. First, on January 5, 1728, the Royal and Pontifical University was founded in the Convent of San Juan de Letrán of the Dominican fathers. They would rule it for more than a century, until its exclaustration in 1842, when the teaching center passed into the hands of the Spanish state. In his classrooms theology, Canons, Laws, Medicine, Philosophy, Mathematics, Rhetoric and Grammar were taught, and although he was marked by a conservative tradition of teaching, based on methods from previous centuries, it should not be forgotten that he had notable professors such as the priest José Agustín Caballero and Dr. Tomás Romay and that in it he received his bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Theology.
There’s another institution that turned out to be shorter-lived. It is the Colegio San José founded by the parents of the Society of Jesus, supported by a Royal Order of 1721, which began operating three years later, in houses in front of the Convent of Santo Domingo, because the building itself only began to be built after 1727 and apparently concluded around 1752.3 Very soon the center gathered what has been considered the most important library of its time , and his humanist and novel teaching earned him from the skeptical Bachiller and Morales the phrase “to the impulse given by the Jesuits were made progress that we reach today”.4 Two important Cuban clerics were formed in their classrooms, the famous sacred speaker Francisco Javier Conde y Oquendo and Luis Ignacio Peñalver y Cárdenas, future auxiliary bishop of New Orleans. His work was truncated when the Company was expelled, by order of Charles III, in the early morning of June 11, 1767.
This unfortunate event would, however, motivate another, more lasting initiative. Bishop Santiago José de Hechavarría, a Creole who had so much love for his homeland that he aroused the suspicion of the colonial authorities, founded in the building that the Royal Seminary College of San Carlos and San Ambrosio was vacated in 1773. In this way, the Seminary San Ambrosio was enlarged, founded by Compostela and the functions of the Colegio San José were also filled, because in it would not only study the candidates for sacred orders, but also those who would prepare to obtain later the bachelor’s and graduate degrees at a university. The prelated endowed the center with new equipment, and energized its teaching with virtuous and well-prepared teachers.
In February 1801 Juan José Díaz de Espada y Fernández de Landa (1756–1832), appointed bishop of the diocese by Pope Pius VII, arrived in Havana. Son of the Basque country, he brought notions learned in that land for relations with central political power. The Economic Society of Friends of the Country in which he was soon appointed “honorary partner” was one of his preferred vehicles to carry out those subsidiary tasks that neither the captains general nor the lobbyists performed as appropriate. With the persuasion or with the strength of his power, he made the great owners aware of their duties with local affairs, which in economic matters had its maximum expression in the demand of the collection of tithes to the farmers – which brought him many antipathies – because only with the coffers of the bishopric well provided could he carry out his projects.
A firm character, difficult to intimidate, allowed him throughout his government to deal on the one hand with the conservative clergy – especially the regular one – on the other with the venality of the authorities and the ojeriza of the slavers. It was necessary to be very brave to declare in Havana of 1803 an Edict of Bells, which limited the tañidos of these in the city – which was to be appreciated on an environmental level – and subject them to a tax that could have an application of common interest, especially to undertake the following year the campaign to build a public cemetery , which would be known as Sword Cemetery and definitively eradicate burials in temples.
Today some of his actions may seem strange to us, such as the provision that to baptize a child it was necessary to present a certificate of having been vaccinated against smallpox by Dr. Tomás Romay, but, decidedly, he could only use the mechanisms at his disposal to obtain meritorious purposes.
Many know of his work of gearing with the Seminary, the way in which he endowed the chairs of Physics, Chemistry and Economics, as well as his encouragement to the most notable talents that explained the various subjects there: Nicolás Escobedo, José Agustín Govantes, José Antonio Saco. However, the commitment that was to crown all this is less well known: when Father Varela arrives in Madrid as a member of Cortes, he is commissioned to secretly request Don Manuel José Quintana, Minister of Public Instruction, to provide the granting of the rank of University to the Seminary, which in Espada’s opinion deserves more than the anquiloous institution of the Dominicans. The restoration of absolutism prevented the procedure.
Do not forget its influence on the highest authorities of the island to promote other initiatives, such as the creation of the Academy of Fine Arts San Alejandro, the foundation of the Hospital de Dementes San Dionisio, next to the Espada Cemetery and the building of the Templete in 1828 on the site where tradition indicated that Havana had been founded.
Juan José Díaz de Espada was not simply a benefactor bishop, but first and foremost a stateist. His charitable action led mainly to a special intelligence for the promotion of the laity, the dynamization of the clergy – not limited only to their “moralization” – and attention to the affairs of the country with an incisive and up-to-date view. José Martí called him “that Spanish bishop who carried in our hearts all Cubans, Espada, who loved us well, in times when among the Spaniards it was not dishonorable to love freedom or look for his children.”5
After the restoration of absolutism in Spain and, above all, after the death of Espada in 1832, the Board of Trustees Regio was responsible for not appointing other bishops of liberal thought in Cuba, nor did he support the promotion of the Creole clergy to prominent positions. From 1838 the Seminary College was left alone for the formation of the clergy. This would seriously resent the social work of the Church, but it would be possible to find other ways to continue serving the people.
In 1847 the first Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, who took charge of the Charity – successor of the Cuna House – soon extended to other service institutions such as the Hospital de Paula and several schools, including san Francisco de Sales, La Domiciliaria (1866) and then the very prestigious La Inmaculada (1874). Other schools for women’s education would be those of the Mothers of the Sacred Heart in Texas (1858) and on the Hill (1877), plus those of other congregations such as the Religious of the Love of God, the French Dominicas and then the founding in 1891 of the first Cuban female religious congregation dedicated to education, the Apostolate of the Sacred Heart.
The Jesuits returned in 1854 and in a part of the Convalescence of Bethlehem opened the Royal College of Bethlehem, whose initial enrolment was only forty students. However, they soon gained prestige thanks to the excellent preparation of their cloister, which included Father Benito Viñes, father of Cuban meteorology and driver of the Observatory that lasted just over a century. In his classrooms he studied the Camagueyan scientist Carlos J. Finlay.
The charitable work of Bishop Friar Jacinto María Martínez, who, without the support of the Spanish state, began the erection of a new cemetery, because It is already insufficient that of Espada and could not see it finished because the colonial authorities were made ungrateful who slandered him and expelled him from the island, but that necropolis is still the main one in Havana. His successor, Apolinar Serrano, was barely able to rule the diocese for a few months, as he died of yellow fever, but in that period he exercised charity with such generosity that, when he died, it was necessary to make a public collection to pay for his burial.
It is often forgotten in these analyses the role of the laity in the exercise of works of public benefit, suffice to recall the foundation of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul in 1858 by Don Antonio Rosales and the Count of Peñalver, who, through their groups or “conferences” in different parishes, provided help to families without resources, the interesting thing was that its members did not just give money , food or medicines to the poor, but were obliged to take them home, so as not to lose contact with the under-favoured.6
Meritoria was also the work of certain prominent figures of society who served as benefactors for Christian-oriented social projects. This is the case of Dona Susana Benítez and Pérez Abreu, a natural of Bejucal, founder of the school El Santo Angel in Teniente Rey y San Ignacio, who left in her will more than one hundred thousand pesos in gold for the Congregation of the Homeless Elders, so that it was possible to acquire quinta Santovenia on the Hill and open there the home that still welcomes many seniors.7
The twentieth century opened with a Cuba intervened by the United States and a Church that had just broken with Spanish subjection and had to reorganize its dwindid forces to solve great pastoral problems. Many political and intellectual figures leaned towards agnosticism, and Freemasonry expanded its influence. The argument that the Catholic hierarchy was adverse to the island’s independence is often used. When the Republic was proclaimed in 1902, with a Constitution that separated the Church of State, relations between the two sides were uncomfortable. Even in 1919, when the 400th anniversary of the founding of Havana was celebrated, President Mario García Menocal did not attend religious celebrations, but in addition, permission for processions or campaign masses was not granted in public spaces.
Despite all this, the Cuban Church was organizing and growing. His presence in society was felt especially in education. While many of the congregations that were already dedicated to teaching remained and consolidated, others arrived on the island in the following decades: the Augustinians in 1901, the Marists in 1903, the Brothers of the Salle in 1905, the Salesians in 1916. The 1901 Constitution had recognized the right to private and religious education, so that they were able to carry out their work for years without too many starts.
These centres were not limited to general education, some also responded to the need to train manual workers in trades and technical specialties. Students, mostly from working families, he was able to find not only an essential training to start his working life advantageously, but also a comprehensive education that served, first of all, the human promotion of the educated, as was the case in the Schools of Arts and Crafts led by the Salesians, to which would later be added ambitious endeavors such as the Catholic Social University of La Salle and the Electro Mechanical School known as universidad Obrera de Bethlehem.
An emblematic teaching institution was the Universidad Santo Tomás de Villanueva founded in 1946, by the Augustinians. He was a senior private educational center in the country, and initially had five faculties: Philosophy and Letters, Law, Education, Commercial Sciences and Three-Year Bachelor of Arts in English, as it was valid to complete the Master of Arts at some American university. It was then expanded with a Faculty of Science and Technology and opened the first school to train professional psychologists.8 In addition to the religious he had prestigious lay teachers such as José María Chacón y Calvo, Mercedes García Tudurí and José Manuel Pérez Cabrera. It began with thirty-four students and in 1959 had 1,589. It was only able to extend its operation until 1961, but it served as the basis for later educational experiences of the Church.
Nor should we forget the courses aimed at domestic workers or workers who at evening times offered several female religious houses such as the Convent of the Restorative Mothers in Reina Street and that of the Daughters of Maria Immaculate in their house popularly known as “the Domestic Service” on the Hill.
When it comes to Catholic education, schools governed by religious congregations are routinely thought of, but there was much more extensive work, including parish schools attended by secular clergy; the lay schools of Catholic orientation that, in some cases, had a prestige of national scope as happened with the Baldor College and El Angel de la Guarda led by Mariana Lola Alvarez; as well as the work of lay pedagogues who held professorships at different levels of official teaching and gave fruitful witness to their faith in their formative work, remember names such as those of Rosa Trina Lagomasino, Manuel Dorta Duque, Raimundo Lazo, Luis de Soto and Aurelio Boza Masvidal.
Despite the critical situation of the Cuban economy in the early Republican lusters, it was possible not only to rebuild parish work, but to modernize or create new welfare institutions. This is demonstrated by the closure of the old Hospital de San Lázaro, which gave its name to a central street, and its replacement by a modern sanatorium in El Rincón. Cooperation between private benefactors and religious congregations allowed the emergence of institutions such as the Carvajal, Menocal and Truffin asylums, as well as the sanatorium La Milagrosa, founded by the Association of Cuban Catholics and governed by the Daughters of Charity.
Very important for the social presence of the Church was the associative movement of laity that shows an active and committed presence in society. This is the case of the Order of the Knights of Columbus, founded in 1909, whose members not only carried out important charitable work, but were present in the world of the press, education, intellectual debates and politics. The Elizabethan Ladies, who emerged in 1925, should also be reminded of those who were the lifeblood of decisive public health work such as the “Anti-TB Campaign” and then the one undertaken against cancer. They also had the vision of founding in 1939 the Cultural House of Catholics, online and D in El Vedado, as a way to inculturate the gospel message and open a forum for exchange with society.
Brother Victorino’s initiative of La Salle to found the Federation of Catholic Youth in 1928 was the first of the steps to form Cuban Catholic Action, in an accelerated process that went from his canonical erection by bishops in December 1938 to the completement of its four branches in 1944. It contributed decisively to the formation of an active laity and, in particular, of youth leaders who performed a strong apostolate in society, based on knowledge of the Social Doctrine of the Church and the will to be present in all environments: the student world, the worker, the spaces of culture and even in the world of politics. Personalities such as Pastor González, Rubén Darío Rumbaut, América Penichet and Gina Preval have left an appreciable mark on setting up a new face for the Cuban Church.
The triumph, in January 1959, of the rebellion against Batista, in which many Catholics had participated, generated high expectations between the hierarchy and the faithful, social measures such as land reform and the reduction of rents had an important consensus within the institution, however, already at the end of the year, with the celebration of the National Catholic Congress, preventions were shown in the face of rapprochement with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries , while increasing the presence of communist movement figures in the direction of the country. The contradictions were compounded in 1960 by the public rejection of the episcopate to the change of political course towards socialism9 and reached its peak in 1961 with the arrest of bishops, priests and lay people during the invasion by Playa Girón, the intervention of private education and many charitable institutions, as well as almost all media – radio hours , television spaces and pages in newspapers – in addition to the expulsion of more than 130 priests on the Spanish ship Covadonga.
Then began a period somewhat similar to that of the early Christian Church. Processions and any other form of worship could not be held in public spaces. Teaching was reduced to catechesis within temples or lay conferences and meetings on religious and cultural issues. It was the parish structures that had to assume the essentials of pastoral care: care for the sick, collections for parishioners or neighbors in need, visits to prisoners or their families. A few institutions from the previous period managed to survive as the Hospital de Paula, that of San Lázaro, the Santovenia Asylum. In other cases, it was necessary to find new ways of relationship, as was the case with the Menocal Asylum that had been devoted to the education of orphaned girls; when the State intervened in the center and decided to take over the education of those, the institution was renamed the Golden Age and dedicated to minors with physical and mental disabilities, but the Daughters of Charity remained there until today, devoted to this difficult and holy work.
For decades this period, called “the silent witness”, extended, but against those who predicted that the Church would disappear in the short term, it could be sustained and reorganized, depending on new social realities. Havana witnessed the Cuban National Ecclesial Meeting in 1986. The theme of the event “Church Without Borders, Solidarity in Love” demonstrated the institution’s willingness to emerge from the narrow margins in which it had been confined for a quarter of a century. It was also a way of healing old wounds, giving up reproaches and complaints in the name of charity, and the finding that, just as there was appreciable generational relief, it was possible to lay new foundations for their work that did not exclude dialogue with non-believers and even the possibility of having learned something from recent circumstances.
Three dimensions were pointed out for this renewed Church: Evangelizing, Prayerful and Incarnate Church. That is, centered on Christ and the Gospel message, marked by an inner dimension of strong experience of the Christian mystery and to the outside committed to social circumstances. The Instruction of Bishops for the promulgation of the ENEC Final Document in May 1986 stated:
“Faith in the incarnation impels militant Christians to seek forms of presence and collaboration, without disrespecting one’s faith, in all secular, non-confessional activities and organizations, that is, that they do not necessarily demand to be an atheist and abjure of our own principles. We refer to labor, school, pionerile, scientific, professional, peasant, advocacy, cultural, sporting organizations … participating in every task that is directed to the common good.”10
After this event, Habanera ecclesial life – as in the rest of the dioceses – gave symptoms of animation in its social work, of which it attests, for example, to the foundation of Caritas Cuba, with its diocesan subsidiaries, conceived not only as a representation of this beneficial world organization but as a coordinated way of offering assistance and human promotion to the people, while becoming an appropriate interlocutor with official or non-governmental bodies to carry out their work.
In 1990, the Archdiocesan Center for Studies of Havana emerged, encouraged by Archbishop Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who brought together professors and researchers from humanist culture and different branches of science to discuss important intellectual issues. It was a bulwark of cultural life at a time when the country’s difficult circumstances had visibly affected daily life and participation in cultural events. Materials from the discussions were published in Vivarium magazine.
At the same time, there is a process of resuscitation of the Catholic press of the country, in which more extension and relief of existing publications and new ones emerge whose interest goes beyond the parish communities, is the case of Palabra Nueva, founded in 1992 on the initiative of Cardinal Jaime Ortega, Msgr. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and the lay Orlando Márquez , who led it for a quarter of a century, and continues to be published with a circulation of several thousand copies, given the interest it arouses in non-Church readers and especially in a broad intellectual sector; it is also worth taking into account the emergence of Spaces (1997), which a few years later took the name of Lay Space, as well as various publications of the different pastorals of the archdiocese.
The visits of three high pontiffs to the Island, in a period of just seventeen years: John Paul II (1998), Benedict XVI (2012) and Francis (2015) came to confirm the vitality of a Church that can no longer be retained inside the temples.
A very visible sign of the Catholic social presence has been the development of various educational projects, conceived as complementary to official teaching, including subjects of different branches of knowledge, together with human formation. Very visible has been the work of the Dominican Fathers with their project in the Convent San Juan de Letrán that offers special courses for teenagers, young people and adults, and includes the Bartolomé de las Casas Classroom which is already a space dedicated to exchange with the most notable intellectuals of the country or visitors, known for the depth of their debates. Other equivalent initiatives have been implemented by the Brothers of La Salle at their headquarters in the parish of Jesús del Monte, the Escolapio Fathers in Guanabacoa and the Society of Jesus at the Loyola Center.
Special mention deserves the birth in the last decade, of the Padre Félix Varela Cultural Center at the headquarters of the former Seminary of San Carlos and San Ambrosio, at the initiative of Cardinal Ortega, which is a space for intellectual dialogue between believers and people of goodwill of any orientation, through its art exhibitions, film projections, conferences and panels on social issues , historical, literary and the functioning of a well-endowed library. The institution houses among its venerable walls an Institute of Ecclesiastical Studies, a project supported by the Holy See that forms, fundamentally, lay people in a Bachelor of Humanities and a Bachelor of Science in Social Sciences, honoring a tradition that comes from the parents of Cuban enlightened thought who were teachers in this building: José Agustín Caballero, Félix Varela and José de la Luz y Caballero.
If we looked at the urban fabric of our capital, it would highlight the presence of temples that are among the most significant buildings: that of the Holy Spirit, the oldest Habanera parish; the lavout building of Our Lady of Mercy, full of artistic treasures; The Holy Angel, definitely associated with the Cecilia Valdés de Cirilo Villaverde; plus those who built outside the walls, the Sanctuary of Charity, St. John lateran, Our Lady of Carmen, the Sacred Heart of queen and many others. Their monumental presences come to remind us that for years they were not only places of prayer but places that gathered the people to sanctify marriages, births, fire deceased loved ones and place of refuge against natural disasters, epidemics, pirate attacks. Great Cuban and foreign artists contributed to its construction and ornamentation, from José Nicolás de la Escalera, to Melero, Chartrand, Hipólito Hidalgo de Caviedes, Martínez Andrés. Today, in a different society, they continue to host living communities and often pass through their doors non-believers looking for a moment of silence, of tranquility, of enjoying the beauty and peace of these interiors, as a first approach to the sacred. These constructions are the living symbol of a Christian presence among us that has suffered from the sixteenth century until today attacks, storms, crises, but continues to bet on the encounter with all men. Ω
Notes
1Juan Martín Leiseca: Notes for the ecclesiastical history of Cuba, Havana, Talleres Tipográficos de Carasa y Cía, 1938, p. 44.
2 Antonio Bachiller y Morales: Notes for the history of letters and public instruction on the Island of Cuba, Havana, Academy of Sciences of Cuba, Library of Cuban Authors, 1965, t. I, p. 41.
3 Pedro M. Pruna: The Jesuits in Cuba until 1767, Havana, Editorial of Social Sciences, 1991, p. 35.
4 Antonio Bachiller y Morales: ob. cit., p. 276.
5 José Martí: “Antonio Bachiller y Morales”, Complete Works, Havana, Editorial of Social Sciences, 1975, t. 5, p. 145.
6 Manuel Fernández Santalices: Presence in Cuba of Catholicism. Historical notes of the twentieth century, Caracas, Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 1998, p. 20.
7 Luis Bay Sevilla: “La Quinta de Santovenia”, Diario de la Marina, Havana, February 7, 1946.
8 Leonel A. de la Cuesta: “Evocation of Villanueva”, bloged Another Monday, Year V, No. 20, September 2011: http://otrolunes.com/archivos/16-20/?sumario/este-lunes/evocacion-de-villanueva.html, accessed 29 September 2015.
9 “Collective circular of the Cuban episcopate, August 7, 1960”, in The Voice of the Church in Cuba. 100 Episcopal Documents, Mexico, National Work of the Good Press, 1995, p. 118.
10 “Pastoral instruction of the Bishops of Cuba on the occasion of the promulgation of the final document of the Cuban National Ecclesial Meeting, May, 1986”, in The Voice of the Church in Cuba, p. 293.
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