Fr. Tom Euteneuer, June 15-24, 2007.

José Martí is the Founding Father of Cuba.  His motto, which can be seen emblazoned on one of the buildings at the airport bearing his name, was "Patria Es Humanidad" (Homeland is Humanity), but that motto was changed to "Patria o Muerte" (Homeland or Death).  Some say the motto really should be "Patria es Muerte" (the Homeland is Death), given the total abortion culture that exists in Cuba.  My guests said that the motto perfectly symbolizes a perfect culture of death.

The most grievous offence of pre-revolutionary Cuba was its tolerance of abortion.  According to the Cuban pro-lifers, abortion was legal in the 30s and grew to heavy practice in the 40s and 50s, so much so that allegedly it was the preferred place for rich American women to come for their abortions and practiced privately by all the best Cuban doctors.  In Cuba, abortion already had some legal standing.  It was decriminalized under certain conditions in 1936.

At the time of the Castro revolution, the best doctors left the island, and the abortion practice fell into the hands of second-rate doctors who were killing women all over the place.  The abortion lobby then pushed for liberalization of the law, and in 1965 Cuba adopted the Soviet practice of abortion on demand for the early stages of pregnancy.  In 1980 they institutionalized the practice and made it legal to have an abortion up to 26 weeks, 6-10 weeks "on demand" and 11-26 for "health" reasons.  All throughout the pregnancy, however, it is still legal to have an abortion for the "life of the mother" and "rape" exceptions.

There is an irony here: in the US, abortion is an industry, and most doctors practice it because it is extremely lucrative.  In Cuba, the only crime for an abortionist is to charge for his services!  Other regulations are simple: abortions must be done by doctors and must be done in state hospitals or clinics.  They say that rich Hispanic women now come to Cuba for their abortions, making it the Latin American abortion paradise as it was previously the North American abortion killing place.

THREE ABORTIONS FOR EVERY LIVE BIRTH - BUT ALSO CONVERSIONS

Technically, according to Cuban law, life begins when the umbilical chord is detached, so there is no legal protection for unborn children. There are three abortions for every live birth in Cuba. The situation is exacerbated by the constant pressure and expectation to abort, both in the medical community and in the culture at large.  My hosts told me that the first question that a woman is asked when she finds out she is pregnant is, "Are you really going to keep it?"  This is hardly any different from the American culture, except a bit more overt.  Cuban doctors told me that they have strict quotas to keep and indexes of medical materials to stay within, and there can be severe reprisals if they do not tow the line.  Abortion is just a medical statistic now.  It has no moral dimension.

Last year I met a man at a church in a poor barrio of Havana who was an abortionist for 20 years until he was evangelized by two of Pro-Vida Cuba's best pro-life doctors.  Their words and example struck him to the core and caused a crisis of conscience within him.  Eventually, he gave up the practice and as a result almost had his license suspended, was persecuted and harassed by other doctors, and continues to find it difficult to work anywhere.  He and other non-abortion doctors in the ob/gyn specialty are marginalized and pushed to certain areas where they will not be coerced into doing abortions by the system.  He now takes care of the women who are at the end-stages of pregnancy, and another pro-life doctor generally takes care of older women.

A lawyer told me of the outright persecution of his wife when she got pregnant with their fourth child at age 40.  They were lied to about possible Down's syndrome; she was checked up on and pressured every week to have an abortion; and finally this lawyer had to put his foot down and flatly reject the idea of abortion.  The medical doctor finally said, "What is wrong with you?  Why would anyone want to keep this pregnancy?  Are you Catholic?  Well, that explains it."  Those who are not firmly grounded in their moral convictions will easily cave in to pressure of this kind.  One medical student I met said that it is routine to take the medical history of women who have had an average of five abortions in their reproductive lives and she said that a classmate of hers took the history of a woman who had had 18 abortions.

DEMOGRAPHIC SUICIDE

In the face of this desperate abortion culture, the government is just now waking up to the reality that Cuba is staring down a demographic crisis of immense proportions.  In a May 2006 article from a national paper, an official of the National Statistical Office complained that the birthrate has plummeted catastrophically in the last 35 years and the population is getting older.  On top of that, the young people are less and less interested in having children at all.  Cuba is closing children's hospitals and schools now because they just don't have the children.

The very week I was in Cuba, the National Statistical Office issued its "Annual Health Statistics" report and the numbers were not pretty.  The drop in births since 1970 has been precipitous, and the blame can be laid directly at the feet of abortion and contraception: in 1970 there were 237,019 live births; in 1975-192,941; 1985-182,067; 1995-147,170; 2005-120,716; and in 2006 only 111,323 births.  This shocking drop in births means that this small island has a dismal future to say the least.

The same article noted that by 2015 there will be more retired people on the island than people in their working years.  That is just frightening.  It went on to say that if in the next 10 years Cuba has not formulated a "coherent politics of reproduction, we will see each other more at funerals than at children's birthday parties."  Fr. Marx used to use that same image all the time.  A Statistics Office spokesperson, María del Carmen Franco, said it a bit more bluntly:  "The only way [to solve this problem] is to augment births."  And she said that Cuba has less than a decade to do it.  Given the ideologically rigid abortion and contraceptive culture of the medical profession, I can't see that happening.

THE HOLY SANCTUARY OF OUR LADY OF CHARITY

Prior to joining HLI, I served as a parish priest in Florida and met so many wonderful Cuban people there who told me about Our Lady of Charity, the Patroness of the Cuban people.  On one of the days of my visit, I visited Mary's shrine at the eastern end of the island in the province of Santiago de Cuba, and what a blessed experience it was.

When we arrived at the local airport, we had a large, gregarious black taxi driver, whose head almost hit the inside of the ceiling of the Soviet-era car as he drove.  His taxi was a broken down Lada car, which he drove like a banshee, and I was not sure it would actually make it to the shrine 15 km away.  He seemed to have no such concerns.  While we drove at breakneck speed down unpaved and pothole-filled roads, he was waving to every third person on the street.  Several times he stopped to buy things from street vendors and twice let people in the taxi on our dime-one guy he brought in was his brother-in-law who had to get to the other side of town!  He bought me a coconut for the delicious milk it contained, and I was grateful for the kindness.  We eventually made it to the shrine, and I remarked what a sense of humor Our Lady must have!

The regularly-assigned priest had to be away, so it fell to me to offer the public Mass that day to a diverse crowd at the shrine from many places in the Caribbean and Latin America.  In the intense tropical heat-no air conditioning, of course-I prayed for the dear Cuban people, their faith and wellbeing.  I also prayed for Human Life International and all our supporters.

THE WHOLE REASON FOR THE VISIT

The last stage of my journey brought me to the Province of Holguín (pronounced "ole-gheen"), where a very zealous group of about 35 pro-lifers had gathered from the eastern provinces of Camagüey, Guantánamo, and Las Tunas.  I gave them two solid days of my best pro-life materials on abortion, contraception, and family life; and like newly-minted converts, they drank it all in with zeal and gratitude.  What a pleasure to see authentic pro-lifers living out their convictions in such dire circumstances!

One success story was particularly consoling during this visit.  A 17-year old girl named Inés (Agnes) came to our weekend seminar in Holguín, invited by a friend of hers the day before.  She did not know anything about pro-life, but by coming to our seminar she was able to postpone her obligatory military service.  When she came, she heard an earful of wonderful truth about the dignity of the unborn child and the sanctity of life, and during the weekend she revealed to us an amazing story.  She just found out she was pregnant, and if she had gone to the military service, she would have undoubtedly had an abortion.  Now she was a mom and keeping the baby!  She hugged me and thanked me for coming all the way to Cuba.  "You saved a life," she said-but I said, "To God be the glory!"

BISHOPS OF A SUFFERING BUT HOPEFUL CHURCH

During my visit, I was privileged to meet the legendary Jaime Cardinal Ortega, the prince of the Church who sponsored the famous 1998 visit of Pope John Paul II to Cuba.  He is still young and dynamic and has a difficult job trying to evangelize the faith in dire circumstances.  Both of my visits (2006 and 2007) happened to coincide with meetings of the Cuban Episcopal Conference in Havana.  As a whole, the bishops seem to be excellent men of the Church and real shepherds of souls. Despite distinct differences in the styles and temperaments of the bishops and even stances toward the government, no one questions their orthodoxy.  That is refreshing.  Probably the best commentary on the Church in Cuba is that their bishops are all native Cubans and when they speak in public, it is said that "they speak as one man."

There are only 330 priests on the island; 155 of them are native Cuban.  Cuba, however, has 49 major seminarians, 14 from Havana.  Cardinal Ortega will ordain four this year and has six entering seminary this coming fall, of whom he seems to be particularly proud.  Some of the conversion stories of these men are truly fantastic.  All four of the men to be ordained entered seminary in 1999, the year after the pope's visit.  Most of the seminarians on the island are converts to the Faith since that time.  Judging from these fruits alone, it is hard to over-estimate the impact of the visit of Pope John Paul II to Christ's suffering people in Cuba.

PRAYERS AND HOPE

This humble visit to Cuba was one of planting many pro-life seeds in the hearts and minds of people.  We plant, and God makes the seedling grow.  We must continue to pray for the people of Cuba so that one day God will bring all those seeds to fruition in a totally transformed Cuban culture of life!