c. 1998 Religion News Service

HAVANA _ Cuba’s religious revival, which began in 1991 and which Pope John Paul II hopes to boost during his current visit to the island nation, has spurred growth in a number of faith movements across the Marxist country.

The Cuban Roman Catholic Church and a host of Protestant denominations _ mainline, evangelical, and Pentecostal _ have been the prime beneficiaries of the revival that began when President Fidel Castro changed course and allowed religious believers into the Communist Party. The next year, Cuba’s official description of itself as an atheist nation was changed to that of being a secular society.

But in addition to the Roman Catholics and Protestants, other religious movements have also benefited from Castro’s switch, which critics of the government say was prompted by his realization the revolution was in trouble and embracing rather than opposing Cubans’ growing expressions of faith was the politically prudent course of action.

Here are sketches of how three other religious communities _ Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Yoruba-Lucumi _ have fared since the start of Cuba’s religious revival.

The Jewish community

The disrepair of the Gran Sinagoga de la Communidad Hebrea _ Havana’s largest and primary synagogue built in 1953 _ speaks volumes about the distance Cuba’s small Jewish population needs to travel if it is to survive another generation or two.

One of three Havana synagogues, the Gran Sinagoga’s main sanctuary is missing most of its ceiling tiles and its windows are broken. Termites have undermined its support beams and additions are made to the board that memorializes the community’s deceased on pieces of paper because metal nameplates have become too costly.”It’s very sad because we cannot fix it because we live on donations and what we get we need to buy food first,”said Adela Dworkin, 59, librarian at the Cuban Jewish Community Center, located next door to the synagogue.

Cuba’s Jewish population _ which traces it origin to the American, Turkish and Moroccan Jewish businessmen and their families who arrived here after the 1898 Spanish-American War that ended Spanish colonialism _ once numbered close to 25,000. Swelling the numbers were European Jewish refugees who fled here to escape the Holocaust but began to leave when World War II ended.

Today, the community numbers less than 1,500, its ranks depleted by the mass exodus of Cuba’s Jews to Miami and elsewhere following Castro’s rise to power. Once solidly middle- and upper-class, the community is now poor, although not as poor as many Cubans, and is sustained by donations from Mexican, Canadian, Venezuelan and U.S. Jews.

Always highly assimilated, Cuban Jews today marry non-Jews at a rate of 90 percent and less than half of all younger Cuban Jews are Jewish by traditional Jewish standards, meaning their mothers were Jews.

The island also has no full-time rabbis, but relies on periodic visits from foreign rabbis.

During the height of the Castro government’s more than 30 years of religious repression, said Dr. Jose Miller, a retired surgeon who serves as president of the island’s Jewish community council, Jews were not persecuted as Jews,”but Jews repressed their Judaism themselves to show they were the biggest revolutionaries.” As a result, a generation of Jewish observance and learning was lost and the active community today has become one of the elderly and those young newly attracted to their roots. Missing are the middle-aged.

Miller talks proudly of the new interest in Judaism among many of the community’s young, but even he admits he is unsure of Cuban Jews will survive as an identifiable group more than another generation or two.

The community’s precariousness, like the state of the Gran Sinagoga, is also evident in Pablo Verbitsky, a 20-year-old who is among the most Jewishly literate of the younger generation. He calls himself”traditional”but does not follow Jewish dietary laws. He also said that should he have the opportunity to visit Israel, he just might stay there.

The Greek Orthodox community

Greek Orthodox Archbishop Athenagoras leads some 100,00 church members spread across Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, Colombia and Venezuela. He hopes to soon add to his flock as many as 35,000 Afro-Cubans who practice a blend of Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism _ offspring of converts to Orthodoxy missionized by a black Jamaican and self-styled Orthodox bishop who came here in the 1940s.

Moreover, Athenagoras, here for the papal visit, is also hoping to restore Orthodox control over a church built by a separate Havana community of some 200-300 mainly Greek and Lebanese Orthodox Christian families in the late 1950s. After Castro’s revolution, which prompted the community’s exodus from Cuba, the church was abandoned. The church _ its exterior crosses removed and its interior icons covered by black paint _ is now a theater.

The Chicago-born Athenagoras has been meeting with Cuban government officials and said he is hopeful the structure _ named Sts. Constantine and Helen by its founders _ will be returned to Orthodox control within the next year.

In the meantime, he has sent one Cuban to Greece for training as a priest and hopes to gain government approval to send two more.”Three-fourths of our faithful in my archdiocese are converts, and if Orthodoxy is grow here as well, it can only be with Cuban-born leadership,”Athenagoras said.

The Cubans he hopes to transform into priests are black Cubans who have been baptized since the early 1990s, have increased the size of the island’s Orthodox population more than three-fold _ from about 10,000 to about 35,000.

Operating out of homes, the group has seven priests _ who have been reordained by Greek Orthodox officials _ but is fuzzy at best about the divide between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Cuba’s largest faith.

Having developed in isolation from the Orthodox mainstream since its beginning in eastern Cuba,”these faithful knew they were not Catholic, but are a little confused about what they are,”said Athenagoras.

The Rev. Michael Graves. the Haiti-based Greek Orthodox vicar for the Caribbean region, established contact with the group some three years ago, starting the process of bringing them into communion with the tradition-bound Greek Orthodox Church.”We have high hopes for Orthodoxy in Cuba, said Graves.”The changes here present an opportunity for many faiths. We have already benefited and we believe the church has a real future here.” The Yoruba-Lucumi community

In the heart of Havana’s Afro-Cuban slum district in the city center, Pedro Fernandez, wearing an Orlando Magic cap, points to a statement from the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, tacked onto the wall of the Casa Templo Yoruba Ifa Iranlowo _ the Yoruba Temple of Salvation.”Accept as truth only what you have learned from your experience,”it says.

Fernandez, like several other of the dozen or so men and women at the temple _ which was missing much of its ceiling and smelled of the rotting carcass of a rooster sacrificed four days earlier _ is a”babalawo, or priest in the Yoruba-Lucumi Afro-Cuban tradition.

Yourba-Lucumi, like its more Catholicized and better known cousin, Santeria, is based on the worship of traditional African deities, known as”orishas”and considered intermediaries between humans and Oloddumare,”the supreme entity who directed the orisha to create life out of the elements.

Animal sacrifice is central to the home-based faith, which lacks a hierarchical structure and in which life’s negative outcomes are considered the result of spiritual imbalance. Practitioners consult priests and offer sacrifices, food and money to the deity controlling their particular concern.”Ogun,”the orisha of metalurgy and arrow-making, for example, might be called upon for advice in business matters.

At the Yoruba Temple of Salvation, more than a half-dozen separate altars contained statues depicting orishas and were decorated with cotton, symbolizing purity, and machettes and knives, recalling African warrior traditions. Candles, fruit and bottles of rum lined the walls of its two small rooms.

The high priest, Victor Betancur, a short wiry man who smoked cigarettes incessantly, said Afro-Cuban religious traditions were first persecuted by the largely white Spanish elite of the Cuban Catholic Church and then, after Castro’s revolution, by the Marxist government.

Still, he noted, Afro-Cuban faith permeates Cuban society, even reaching deep into the Catholic Church, where many members blend Catholicism and Afro-Cuban practices, visiting babalawos in times of ill-health or other troubles. Everyone at the temple Friday (Jan. 23) said they were baptized Catholics.

Since the early 1990s, Betancur added, Afro-Cuban faiths, having previously been driven underground, have gone public and have attracted an unknown but growing following. White Cubans have also become enchanted with the faiths.

John Paul took note of the growth of these faiths, urging Cuba’s young people to reject”alienating spiritualist cults.”He also refused to meet with representatives of the Afro-Cuban faiths.”Maybe this is bad for the pope,”said Fernandez when told of the pontiff’s comment.”Not for me. For me, Catholicism is bad.”

DEA END RIFKIN