Prior to the historic papal visit to Cuba in 1998, the then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright travelled to the Vatican for a meeting with John Paul II at which Cuba was one of the major topics of discussion. After the meeting, Albright reported to President Bill Clinton that the Pope's visit could be a 'point of departure' for unleashing regime-challenging forces on the island just as his visit to Poland had done in 1979.
Like the greater part of official US thinking about Cuba for the past 50 years, Albright's comments betrayed more wishful thinking than informed calculation.
In contrast to Poland, the Catholic Church in Cuba has always been a marginal institution with little historical identification with the forces of Cuban nationalism and a core constituency of middle and upper class white Cubans, many of whom fled the island for the United States in the early 1960s.
Also, the local Catholic hierarchy had its own agenda of outcomes it desired from the Pope's visit, and regime change was certainly not high on it.
Lastly, Fidel Castro was no Wojciech Jaruzelski. Instead he was a genuinely popular leader and a wiley politician — a point he proved by ruling Cuba for the best part of another ten years after Pope John Paul's visit, stepping down this week into a graceful retirement without any hint of civil unrest or political upheaval on the island.
The same day Castro announced his retirement, the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, prepared to leave Rome for Havana on a trip suggested by the Cubans to commemorate the tenth anniversary of John Paul's visit. Bertone did so by holding a press conference at which he described relations between Cuba and the Holy See as 'relatively good' and said Pope Benedict XVI himself might visit the island in the future.
No one talks any more about the Catholic Church as a kind of Trojan horse for bringing about the collapse of the Cuban Revolution.
Bertone, like the rest of us, will find Cuba little changed by Fidel Castro's retirement. This is an event the Cuban leadership has been preparing for even before Fidel became gravely ill. Most obviously, Fidel made a seamless — and it seems widely popular — temporary transfer of power to his brother, Raul, in 2006. More generally Fidel, one of the last remaining communist disciples of any significance, had