Fidel y la Religión: Preaching before Princes

Extract

‘...It is absolutely right and just to state that the revolutionary movement must have a correct attitude towards the (religious) question, and avoid, at all costs, a doctrinal rhetoric which offends the religious sentiments of the people, including that of workers, peasants and the middle layers, and which would only serve to help the system of exploitation.’ Thus Fidel Castro, having offered an explanation as to why religion had been seen as the simple ideological ally of the forces of exploitation, answers Frei Betto’s suggestion that ‘one of the gravest errors of the Left in Latin America was to preach atheism in their work with the masses’.

This is just one of many points covered in a book which is the result of twenty-three hours of interview between the Commander-in-Chief of the Cuban Revolution and a Brazilian Dominican friar known already to readers of New Blackfriars .

Even had the contents been much less interesting than they are, their publication would already have been an historical occasion. Published in Havana in December 1985, the book sold 1,000,000 copies within four months (in an island of ten million people); it has been on the bestseller list in Brazil for a similar length of time, has gone through several editions in Mexico and other Latin American countries. It has been published in Spain, Italy and Poland. But for a few headlines such as ‘Convert Castro woos Church’ earlier this year, it has received scant attention in the British media. At the time of writing this—July—the only English-language edition is available in Australia and Oceania, but not in the U.S. or Great Britain.