The Archbishop Speaks

After young Rebel Fidel Castro led a suicidal attack on Dictator Fulgencio Batista's bristling Moncada barracks in 1953, the man who saved his life was Santiago Archbishop Enrique Perez Serantes, 77. While survivors of the attack were being hunted down and shot on sight, the archbishop, an old friend of the family, rushed to get guarantees from authorities that Castro would not be harmed if he turned himself in. Last week Castro's old friend outspokenly condemned the Castro government's drift toward Communism.

"The boundaries are already drawn," said Perez Serantes in a pastoral letter read throughout his archdiocese and this week reread in many Havana churches. "It can no longer be said that Communism is at the gates, because in truth it is within, speaking powerfully."

Calling Communism "the great enemy of Christianity," Perez Serantes warned that "even within our own ranks there are some who persist in denying" the Communist threat. He thereby hinted at the division in the Cuban clergy over Castro. Among the religious orders, many Franciscans are refugees from Franco Spain and are generally still with Castro, while Jesuits tend to urge an anti-Communist crusade by the church.

Bishop Eduardo Boza Masvidal, rector of the Catholic University of Villanueva, has been speaking out against the Red threat for a year. But a Havana priest named Moises Arrechea recently went on television to say that the "humanism" which Castro espouses is "the work of God himself." Last week, when Castro labor goons followed up the seizure of the pro-Catholic daily Diario de la Marina by grabbing the independent Prensa Libre, Cuba's largest newspaper, Father Guillermo Sardinas rushed to the paper's office to give his congratulations. Said Sardinas, who is chief chaplain of the rebel army: "It was inconceivable that Prensa Libre should oppose the very nation that made it great." Cuba's other six bishops have kept their own council, and Havana's Manuel Cardinal Arteaga is 80, ill and inactive.

If Perez Serantes so far lacks solid church backing, the fact remains that he is Cuba's most respected prelate. "Not in vain," said he, "have some clear-sighted persons been preparing to fight those who try to impose the heavy yoke of the new slavery."

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