Pope Benedict XVI meets with Cuban leader Raul Castro

HAVANA — Pope Benedict XVI held private talks Tuesday with President Raul Castro and sought an expanded role for the church in Cuban life as part of a broader mission to preach hope and freedom to the communist nation.

Senior Cuban officials, however, sounded a defiant note and made it clear that the nation’s important and ongoing reforms were directed at its economy, not at its political system.

“In Cuba, there’s not going to be political reform,” Marino Murillo, a senior economy official and rising star, told reporters. “In Cuba, we are talking about updating the Cuban economic model to make our socialism sustainable, and that has to do with the well-being of our people.”

Benedict has been using this trip to Latin America — only the second time a pontiff has visited revolutionary Cuba — to deliver a subtle but pointed message on behalf of change and human rights. On Monday, during an open-air Mass attended by thousands in the seafront city of Santiago, he told Cubans to build “an open society, a better society.” And on the day this trip started last week, he said Cuba’s Marxist model was outdated and “no longer corresponds to reality.”

On Tuesday, Benedict met with Raul Castro in Havana for nearly 40 minutes. His legendary brother, Fidel, was absent.

Raul Castro, in a dark business suit, greeted Benedict warmly, clasped his hand and led him along a red carpet at the government’s Revolutionary Palace. They sat in large chairs alongside the Vatican and Cuban flags and exchanged gifts. Castro seemed pleased and cordial.

Earlier Tuesday, Benedict prayed at Cuba’s holiest shrine, the Our Lady of Charity Basilica in Cobre, which honors the patron saint of the island. This is the 400th anniversary of the discovery of a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary in the sea off Santiago by two fishermen and a slave. Many Latin American Catholics believe the icon has miraculous powers and make pilgrimages from across the region to seek her favors.

Benedict said he was praying for “those who are deprived of freedom.”

“I have entrusted to the Mother of God the future of your country, advancing along the ways of renewal and hope, for the greater good of all Cubans,” he said. “May nothing or no one take from you your inner joy, which is so characteristic of the Cuban soul.”

Benedict, who had spent nearly three days in Mexico’s central, staunchly Catholic Guanajuato state, arrived in Santiago on Monday. He came to Havana on Tuesday and, on Wednesday, will lead a huge open-air Mass in the capital’s Revolution Square before returning to Rome.

The pope’s visit comes at a time of evolving and improving relations between the Cuban state and the Roman Catholic Church. Once marginalized and repressed, the church today has a growing voice in human rights and social policy issues.

Although Cuban officials say they welcome suggestions from well-meaning outsiders such as the pope on improving the country’s socialist economy, they are determined to chart their own course.

Dissidents, who said they unsuccessfully sought an audience with the pope, complained that more than 150 of their members had been briefly detained, harassed or banned from papal events in the days leading up to Benedict’s arrival.

“The nation is invariably continuing to change everything that needs to be changed, in keeping with the highest aspirations of the Cuban people,” Castro said in welcoming the pope Monday — and at the same time issuing a broad defense of the regime’s careful economic transition and five decades of one-party rule.

It was not immediately clear why Fidel Castro did not join the meeting with the pope. The former president and leader of the 1959 revolution, now 85, fell gravely ill and turned power over to his younger brother in 2008. It was Fidel who so memorably met with John Paul II in 1998, an encounter widely credited with creating an opening for the Catholic Church in Cuba. Both Castros were raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools as children. But revolutionary Cuba declared itself atheist until the 1990s.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the church approached Cuba with “realism and humility” and recognized that the route to change would be “a long road, a difficult road.” Lombardi described the meeting between Raul Castro and Benedict as “cordial.”

Lombardi said Benedict conveyed the church’s desire for a wider role in Cuban life, including in mass media and education. Cuban Catholics would like to gain broadcasting permits and be allowed to open church-run schools for children. Adult education was recently allowed.

“What the pope is saying is, give us a chance. Give us a chance to give our best,” Lombardi said.

The pope did make one concrete request of the Cuban leader: to recognize Good Friday as a national holiday. That request was similar to John Paul II’s 1998 appeal to Fidel Castro to make Christmas an official holiday. Cuba did so that year.

Lombardi said the pope was aware that Cuban dissidents wanted to meet with him to discuss official repression and took those concerns seriously. But he said the trip’s agenda did not include meetings with any private groups, including priests and nuns. He said the pope’s remarks Wednesday would make clear his concern for “all these hopes, all this pain.”

Murillo, the economy official, is overseeing a series of reforms that is aimed at improving productivity by making it easier for residents to start businesses, hire employees and, for the first time, to buy and sell private homes and cars.

Murillo said it was essential for Cuba to step up productivity to satisfy the economic demands of ordinary citizens and state-run enterprises and avoid having to import goods.

Although Cuban officials put new pavement and paint on a couple of streets that the pope is expected to travel, there were few other outward signs of a papal visit. Posters bearing the pontiff’s image were hung on scattered utility poles around the downtown area, but for the most part, life in Havana seemed little different from any other day.

Officials have constructed a massive altar and hung yellow-and-white banners along the sprawling Revolution Plaza, a site of countless public celebrations of the popular uprising that brought Fidel Castro to power. Benedict’s Wednesday Mass at the plaza is viewed as the high point of his Cuba trip.

Though the mood appeared subdued, some residents said they looked forward to hearing what the pope has to say. Some said they hoped he would make a forceful call for an end to the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba — a plea also made by John Paul II and reiterated recently by the Vatican.

“We are hoping for a miracle,” said Rafael Rodriguez, who was selling fluorescent lightbulbs from a stool in the picturesque but crumbling Old Havana section of the capital. “The pope can be a mediator for peace and tranquillity.”

Regardless of the government’s measured response, numerous Cuban Catholics, including exiles who returned from the U.S., have been overjoyed at the pope’s presence.

“The pope is telling us Cubans not to lose faith and to remain united,” said Yanais Matios, 27, who attended Mass in Santiago. “It was a beautiful message.”

“It doesn’t matter if you are Catholic or Baptist or you practice Santeria,” added Alicia Moreno, 56. “We all need miracles.”

ken.ellingwood@latimes.com

Cecilia Sanchez of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed from Santiago and Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson from Mexico City.