Pope's Cuba visit puts eyes on Ortega

HAVANA -- When a young parish priest named Jaime Ortega stepped out of a Cuban detention camp in the spring of 1967, at the height of the Communist revolution's attempt to stamp out religion, his father handed him a one-way ticket to Spain and urged his son not to look back.

But Ortega refused to go.

Forty-five years later and now a cardinal, Ortega heads the island's Roman Catholic Church, which has become the most influential independent institution in the country. In recent years, Ortega, 75, has negotiated with President Raul Castro for the release of political prisoners, given the government advice on economic policy, and allowed church magazines to publish increasingly frank articles about the need for change.

And after Pope Benedict XVI pays a pre-Easter visit, Ortega will have played a part in getting two consecutive pontiffs to turn their spotlight on the Communist nation.

"My impression of Jaime Ortega is that he's just the right man at the right time over these years," said Tom Quigley, a former Latin America policy adviser at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "It seems to me the events of the last couple of years have proved his quiet leadership to have been very effective, and the church is in a much better position than it has been at any time since 1960."

Ortega has used his pulpit to criticize Cuba's Marxist political system and call for greater economic and political freedom, but also to steer the island's young people away from what he warned in a 1998 speech was "a type of United States subculture which invades everything."

Ortega's tenure has not been without controversy.

Dissidents, U.S. diplomats and even some Vatican power brokers have disparaged the cardinal's cautious approach, saying he often seems more concerned with church renovations than with human and political rights. Some even see him as an apologist for the government that once imprisoned him. He declined to be interviewed.

Ortega, often spotted on the cobblestone streets of Old Havana wearing a simple priest's collar, became archbishop of the capital in 1981, and cardinal in 1994, just as the Communist government was easing up on religion.

Following Pope John Paul II's historic 1998 tour, which Ortega helped organize, Fidel Castro declared Christmas a national holiday for the first time since that status was abolished following the 1959 revolution.

Still, the island remains the least overtly religious country in Latin America, with less than 10 percent of the population practicing. Despite years of lobbying, the church has virtually no access to state-run radio or television, is not allowed to administer schools, and has not been granted permission to build new places of worship.

For many years, Ortega rarely spoke out against the government or opined on policy. He has confided privately to diplomats and others about his tumultuous relationship with Fidel Castro, saying the two were often not on speaking terms.

By all accounts, his interaction with Raul, Fidel's less doctrinaire brother who took over in 2006, has been better. Ortega has said he meets regularly with the younger Castro, sometimes giving him advice on the economic reforms the president is pushing. And even if the pews are not packed, that interaction at the highest level gives the church a unique role in a country with no legal opposition or independent press.