Hopefully, Pope Francis Will Call for the End of the U.S. Embargo this Week

On Saturday Pope Francis will begin a four-day visit to Cuba on his way to the United States, where he will arrive the following Tuesday.

It will be the third time a Pope will have traveled to the largest island in the Antilles in less than 20 years, and hundreds of “Bienvenido Francisco” posters are already springing up on walls in Havana.

In 1998 John Paul II became the first pontiff to travel to the island (I covered his visit for the Daily News), and in 2012 Benedict XVI also made the journey.

Hundreds of Cuban-Americans will travel to their homeland to bask in the glow of Francis’ popularity. One of them is Robert Rodríguez Díaz, who is intent on meeting Francis to ask him to apologize for the sexual and emotional abuse he — and hundreds of Cuban children — suffered at the hands of priests entrusted with their care.

Rodríguez Díaz was one of the 14,000 children sent unaccompanied to the U.S. in the 1960's by their parents, deceived by the CIA — with the complicity of the Catholic Church in Miami — into thinking the revolution would take their kids from them. The massive exodus was baptized — ironically, one supposes — as Operation Peter Pan. He has chronicled his years as a Peter Pan in a revealing book, “Choir of Silence,” and a film by the same name.

“I don't know if I will be able to talk to him,” Rodríguez Díaz said, "but I am sure that if I do Francis will understand how much an apology means to us."

Francis, who helped broker the historic thaw between the U.S and Cuba, will find a country radically transformed from the one visited by John Paul.

Seventeen years have gone by and Cuba is a much different country from the one John Paul bid farewell with a ringing condemnation of the U.S. embargo, which, as he told then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, was “oppressive, unjust and ethically unacceptable.”
Today a sea change has occurred in the relations between the two countries, but the embargo, still in place, remains the main obstacle to a full normalization of relations.

On Tuesday Francis will travel to Washington. He will meet with President Obama and address a joint session of Congress. Many believe the Pope will ask the U.S. leaders to end the embargo.

Julio Ruiz, a Cuban-American doctor who for years has worked for a rational Cuba policy, put it this way: “It will be a great opportunity for him to advocate for the embargo to be lifted.”

Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Source: The New York Daily News