The past is still there. Physically, concretely. It’s something you can see and touch, in the murals of Che and the pictures of Fidel. In the almendrones, the American cars from the 1950s that serve as shared taxis you climb into on the go to get into the city. Or in the big letters on the sides of buildings reminding you of the moment when the calendar shifted: “It’s the 59th anniversary of the Revolution.” That was the beginning of the “Wall in the Caribbean,” when Cuba became the outpost, and later an example for half of the world, that half that was looking to socialism for solutions.

Elsewhere, this dream has almost completely dissolved. Here, no. You can still see it and touch it. You get the feeling of being in a place frozen in time, that doesn’t know which direction the future will take; rich with a vivacious humanity and, at the same time, tired and discouraged. In the end, the same thing often happens to us. To all of us. Though it may be a unique place from which to see the world, Cuba is also a mirror for us, a place where you can see right away how right Fr. Giussani was when he used to say to his students, “The forces that change history are the same as those that change the human heart.” There’s no other way.

Perhaps this is why Cuba became the “island of three Popes,” receiving visits from each of the most recent Pontiffs: John Paul II in 1998, Benedict XVI in 2012, and Francis less than two years ago. Of course, it is a strategic stop, both for its history and its geography. It’s a place for encounters that can shift the axes of geopolitical power (like that between Barack Obama and Raúl Castro in March 2016 as part of the country’s re-opening of relations with the United States) or even change the relationship between Churches (it was in the Havana airport that Pope Francis, one month before the Obama/Castro meeting, had embraced Kirill, the patriarch of Moscow and all of Russia). Beyond all of this is the central fact of that strange combination of desire and fatigue, of restlessness and disappointment, that we are all drawn into, and that the Popes continue to address. Like Francis, in that wonderful impromptu speech he gave to the youth here: “Dream, desire, seek new horizons, open yourselves to great things.” But what makes it possible to open yourself? What can re-awaken all of this humanity and broaden the horizon? And what can the Church contribute?

It’s moving to see these questions surface during our visit for the presentation of Su Vida, the biography of Fr. Giussani, which took place on May 25th. The day before, the author, Alberto Savorana, was at a table in a Havana restaurant with the two panelists who would speak along with him. One was Gustavo Andújar, 70. Andújar is editor of Espacio Laical, a magazine about culture and society, and the director of Centro Félix Varela, the cultural center which hosted the presentation. The other, of about the same age, was Roberto Manzano, one of the Cuba’s greatest poets. He’s Catholic but not practicing (“my father was a Communist; my mom wasn’t, but even he was a ‘Communist of the Sacred Heart of Jesus’; he never removed that image from the house....”). He was very struck by Giussani, by the way he talked about the “ultimate questions” and his attention to beauty (“It’s the quickest way of getting to truth: through beauty, man faces his existential angst; it’s therapeutic.”); he notes how “reading about his life you get the sensation of watching someone who’s always on a journey: things build, accumulate, and proceed in a particular direction, and it’s always growing, a movement in which experience has a real impact.”

Dinner was an hour-and-a-half that would have, by itself, justified the trip: the conversation started with Giussani, found its way to Dante and Péguy, then from the Big Bang to the Sagrada Família, then freedom, the Trinity, the Mystery, and at some point that oft-cited word reappeared: “desire.” “There’s a movie you should watch: Suite Habana, by Fernando Perez,” Andújar says. “It tells the story of a single day for about a dozen Cubans, ordinary people. At the end, there are added scenes where the protagonists speak about the dreams they have.” And what are they? “Tiny desires. Fixing up his mom’s house, a car... things like that. One actually said, ‘I don’t have dreams.’ It always disconcerts me. It’s symptomatic of a people who no longer think big, who have given up on any ideals. If you reduce everything to instant gratification, to ‘I like this, I don’t like that,’ our criteria is really impoverished.” And it’s not just a problem for Cuba. “It’s important that Francis spoke about this; Paul VI said that the world doesn’t need teachers, it needs witnesses.”

Six people around the table.
These are words that come to mind again and again during the trip from Havana to Matanzas. One hundred kilometers on a four-lane road; you see palm trees, drills pumping oil, and lilac-colored Buicks that pass you on the right. It feels like being in a movie from the 1950s. In some stretches, you can see the ocean on the left. Signs point to the beaches for the inhabitants of Havana: Santa Cruz, El Friaile, Jibacoa... Varadero and the Cuba of tourists and resorts is still 50 kilometers down the road. Every so often, someone appears on the asphalt, carrying a bunch of bananas or a basket of fruit to sell. Matanzas has 140,000 inhabitants. A maze of bumpy roads, low houses, and unexpected pockets of beauty. But your overall impression is that the heart is there, especially in those six people around the table of a pizzeria with an Italian flag hanging outside. They’re part of the small CL community; the others would make their appearance later at the event with Savorana in the parish, where they peppered him with questions about Giussani, the book, the beginning of the Movement, what they were living. Matanzas is the hometown of Alejandro, the leader of the Cuban community. He works at the chancery and teaches. Deivis and Yiadiana, both medical technicians at the hospital, were his students, and they spoke about how they were there because “he was a different kind of professor, in how he treated us. He didn’t just ask us about his subject, he asked about us.” Witnesses, not teachers.... Then one time they saw a picture of the Pope on his computer. “Are you Catholic?” They became friends. Idelvis, Alejandro’s wife, saw it begin from the outside: “He’d come home and tell me, ‘You know, there are these two students who... I don’t know how to put it, but tienen algo, they’ve got something.’” What this “algo” is, and how it can grow and mature, is what they’re discovering one step at a time, following the Pope and the Movement. First, for Deivis it meant going back to the path of faith that he’d left in his teens, and for Yiadiana, starting with Baptism and her desire to get married in the Church.

“The other day a student said to me, ‘The Church is a dictatorship,’” Alejandro says. “Two years ago, I would’ve gotten angry, and I would’ve tried to convince him with dialectic. Now, I found myself saying, ‘Look, I want to understand why you say that. Because you are a good for me. If you pose this objection, it forces me to go to the heart of what I live.’ He looked at me confused, but it opened up a dialogue.” That’s dialogue. It is something that can’t be taken for granted here. It never is in times of walls and curtains: East and West, socialism and the free market, party and Church. And yet, it was the word that came up more than any other the days we were there, as if to show us just how precious it is.

We traveled back to Havana for the presentation. It was at Centro Félix Varela, located in the old seminary of St. Charles and St. Ambrose in the heart of Habana Vieja, named after the priest and philosopher everyone acknowledges as one of the fathers of the country. “It was here that they started to conceive of Cuba,” Andújar explains. The cathedral is just around the corner. Behind the seminary’s façade–one of the most beautiful in all of Havana–you find a cloister and three levels of classrooms. The building hosts a center of Church studies which has been extended to cover humanities as well, to the point of becoming an alternative university. The government keeps a keen eye on it. Over 100 students are coming to know St. Thomas Aquinas’s social teaching, learning a history and philosophy quite different from that studied in the official academic institutions.

Outside the circle.
The other activities happening inside the center are just as surprising. Four years ago, at the suggestion of Cardinal Jaime Ortega (see p. 13), here was born a place where talks, debates, and roundtables are held almost every month. They involve people from many different backgrounds: authors and musicians, “organic” thinkers and dissidents, Catholics and non-Catholics. “They come because here they find a place where the debate is sincere, where you can really discuss things,” with the one concern of understanding the other person, Andújar notes. Once again, dialogue, where you aren’t expecting it. The presentation on Su Vida returned again and again to this theme. First through Manzano, who expounded upon many of the topics that had come out at dinner: life’s ultimate questions, desire, beauty as the path to truth, wonder at Giussani’s reading of Leopardi, his pedagogy. Then Alberto Savorana, who told the story of the “beautiful day” when the founder of CL discovered that the answer to all these questions was Christ: “Not a doctrine, but a person.” From there flowed “the desire to communicate this discovery to everyone” and the “incredible ca- » pacity for dialogue that he had, with anyone.” He, too, was struck by the fact that “this presentation is happening here, in this place founded to create a space for dialogue, not for dialectics. It’s the same way that Fr. Giussani lived. Having found the answer was the source of his passion for humanity.” Deep down, throughout his life, “he did nothing other than communicate that beauty which has the power to re-awaken all of man’s desire. Because Christ came for the heart that desires.”

“In Cuba, there’s a great longing for spirituality; people have to deal with a daily life that’s difficult; they thirst for something else,” Roberto Méndez said, the next day. He’s the editor of Palabra Nueva, the newspaper of the Archdiocese: at least 10,000 copies every month, up to 12,000, despite the fact that each issue is a bit of an adventure (“we lay out the pages by hand, print it with what means we have, and every month we have to find paper and ink.... It’s more by miracle than by system that each issue goes out....” Their audience is wide, even outside their “circle” (“We may be read by more people outside the Church than within; I find all kinds of people who not only say they read it, but give you their commentary on the articles....”), and the range of contributors follows in the footsteps of the Varela center: intellectuals, economists, professors from all fields. Why do they do it? “Because we offer something that’s different from the majority of official periodicals. There’s no pressure to follow a certain line of ideology. Attention is paid to the person. And there is content that you can’t find anywhere else, not only about the Church or religion, but about society, art, culture....”

Briefly put, a place of freedom. “I’m a consultant for the Pontifical Council for Culture. When Cardinal Ravasi set up the ‘Courtyard of the Gentiles,’ I said, ‘Look, in Cuba we’re already doing this.’” Their reasons? “It’s simple: if we didn’t do it, we’d be desaparecidos,” Méndez says, smiling. “I don’t have a choice: it’s either dialogue or disappear. Because if I close myself inside these four walls, we don’t gain anything. And outside of here, there are more ‘Gentiles’ than Christians. Many more. How can we go out to meet them?”

They do it even though the debates can get intense, and they still feel the weight of ideology. The latest cultural polemic was about abortion, with strong attacks on the Church. “I could respond with a harsh editorial, and I’d receive an equally harsh response and it would all be over,” Méndes says. “The effect? Zero.” What’s the alternative? “We’re learning as we go. Like what happened a little while ago with a feminist sociologist who wrote something about gender. I called her. We got together for coffee. We started a discussion.” For you, what does “dialogue” mean? “It’s the space for an encounter with the other person. As they were saying yesterday at the presentation, it’s not posing counterarguments in order to assert yourself. It’s something we’ve had to learn here, after decades of conflict. But because of this we’re getting to know many non-Catholics who are starting to appreciate some things about the Church. It’s always a new discovery.”

Irreversible Process
“Discussing dialogue doesn’t help; you have to do it,” Andújar says. “By offering a space and receiving people who can express themselves freely here. It’s the most important lever we have to change the current state we’re in. The very fact that it happens means that it’s possible. And I hope that imitators will emerge; we don’t have the problem of wanting a ‘copyright....’”

This sounds very much like the Pope and his invitation to be an outward-looking Church and to “a journey that you learn as you go along.” And meanwhile, a little at a time, things are changing. “We’re at the beginning of an irreversible process,” one friend from the island says. Again, you are reminded of Francis, and the importance he places on “beginning processes, not occupying spaces.” It’s no coincidence that after the Pope’s visit, Cuban television stations started to carefully report his words and actions. Meaning they even broadcast the Christmas mass, the Via Crucis... impossible before, but now it’s happening.

Just as it was impossible only a few years ago to conceive of a presentation of the biography of Fr. Giussani here in Havana. Or to imagine encounters like the one Adalberto, a member of the CL community, told us about. A nuclear engineer who’d been sent to Russia to study (“nuclear technology was supposed to be the future of Cuba; now I do TV appearances...”), he first heard about Jesus from a babushka on a train to Voronez. “She sat down next to me, in an empty cabin, and asked me, ‘Do you know Jesus Christ?’ Then she added, ‘Look, He’s the only one who can help you to live, who can shine light on the way.’” Just like that, word for word. It stuck with him, after years of research and struggle. Until the day when, outside of a church, someone offered him a copy of Huelles, the Spanish version of Traces.... Now he’s here, together with Silvia and Eduardo. And Rafael, who told us about their charitable work: “We go to visit the elderly who, for one reason or another, can no longer come to the parish.” If you ask him what good it does him, he simply answers, “It helps me recognize that Jesus is among us. I don’t know how else to say it.”

This seems small, but it’s everything. “You have to be patient and attentive to every sign, using a magnifying glass to see what’s there, instead of looking at everything that’s missing,” Alejandro says. “But it’s a good exercise. Because often what’s missing is an idea you have; what you see, no matter how small, is there.” And is at work, Fr. Giussani would say