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CUBA
Growing
Government Intolerance and Persecution towards Catholics in Cuba
 Havana (Fides)
29 Nov. 2000 - Government intolerance and repression towards Catholics grows.
The latest move is a law which suspends diplomas or degrees of professionals
who enter a seminary or Religious Order. In recent years a number of medical
doctors have entered a seminary or joined a Jesuit or Franciscan community.
Under this new law, as priests or religious these physicians will be barred
from practicing their profession.
The success the
Church is having with young Cubans generates episodes of intolerance. On
November 21, 2000, in a school in the Havana suburb of Aguada de Pasajeros,
when a holy picture of the island’s patroness, Our Lady of Charity,
dropped out of a book belonging to one of the grade five pupils, the enraged
teacher, Olga Lidia, tore it to pieces and warned the class not to bring
religious pictures to school. When the pupil’s parents complained to the
headmaster, the reply was “in Cuba education is the duty of the state and
not the right of the parents”.
In the meantime
human rights organizations denounce violations on the part of the government.
Around mid-November of last year a document, circulated by the Study Commission
for Freedom in Cuba, was signed by several political prisoners detained in
Havana prisons, including Catholic dissident Maritza Lugo Fernandez. “I
support this document 100 percent, as a dissident, a Catholic and a
woman”, said Ms. Fernandez, who has been arrested arbitrarily more than a
dozen times.
Cuba’s most
well-known political prisoner is Catholic doctor Oscar Elias Biscet Gonzales,
detained since November 3, 1999. He is president of the Lawton Foundation for
Human Rights, and has been put in prison 26 times in 16 months. He is now
serving two years at Cuba Si prison in east Havana for “dishonoring
national symbols”, “disturbing public order” and
“instigating to criminal action”. Biscet Gonzales took part in an
anti-abortion demonstration outside a hospital in Havana in February 1999.
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