Frei Betto, Fidel and Religion: Conversations with Frei Betto on Marxism & Liberation Theology, Ocean Press, Melbourne, 2006. RRP $30, 292pp. Paperback, ISBN 1-920888-45-4, website.
On 15 August, two days after Fidel Castro turned 80, and amid rumours that he was dying, the former Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff made a startling revelation to an Italian journalist about a conversation he and Brazilian priest Frei Betto had once had with the Cuban dictator.
“One day,” Boff recalled, “Fidel told us: Betto and Leonardo, on the day of my death, I want you both to be here at my side.”
Castro has never confirmed the comment and, if it is true, whether it suggests the possibility of a deathbed conversion for a man who was baptised a Catholic only to be excommunicated when he became a Communist, is anyone’s guess.
What is clear, however, is that no assessment of Fidel Castro’s legacy will be complete without serious attention to his thoughts on religion and to how and why, over the past 20 years, this last disciple of Marxism has turned Cuba from an international troublemaker into a global champion for social justice.
That, and continuing uncertainties over Castro’s health, makes the re-publication of Fidel and Religion exceptionally timely. The book, an account of conversations between Castro and Frei Betto about faith, theology and revolutionary commitment, was originally released 20 years ago. It soon sold one million copies in Cuba alone and has since been translated into 23 languages.
Apart from an updated introduction, there is nothing new in this latest edition. But what is old may not be familiar to everyone, and it still makes compelling reading for anyone interested in the historical clash of Christianity and Marxism.
“We are living at a time when politics has entered a near-religious sphere with regard to man and his behaviour,” Castro told a gathering of Chilean Catholic clergy as far back as 1971. “I also believe that we have come to a time when religion can enter the political sphere with regard to man and his material needs.”
That has happened—but hardly in the way Castro envisaged. Except for the brief eruption of liberation theology in Latin America in the '70s and early '80s, religion has not been a major factor for radical social change in any positive sense. Still, a year after liberation theology was denounced by the Vatican as sailing too close to Marxism,