14ymedio, Havana, 18 September 2015 – Aleida Guevara, Che Guevara’s daughter and the director of the Studies Center named after her father, has criticized the call from the authorities for Cubans to attend the Masses that will take place during Pope Francis’s visit to Cuba.
“The PCC (Communist Party of Cuba) asks us, the militants, to go to the Mass, to go and receive Pope Francis; as if it’s practically the task of the Party, with which I don’t entirely agree,” Aleida Guevara told the press agency AFP.
In addition, Aleida Guevara accuses the Catholic Church of having been, “to a great extent complicit in the murders and disappearances of more than 30,000 Argentinians,” during the military dictatorship (1976-1983). However, she gives the benefit of the doubt to Francis, although she doesn’t want to dig into it so as not to be disappointed. “I don’t know where the pope was at that time. What did he really do? I don’t know.”
“I will receive the pope as a visitor, that seems right to me, because he is coming to my house and I receive him with the best I have, it is logical. But to go to a Mass, no, because here there is freedom of religion or of no religion, and for that reason I don’t think I will go,” she says.
During his visit the Pope will celebrate a number of Masses, the first one on Sunday in the Plaza of the Revolution, another in Holguin on Monday a final one on Tuesday the 22 at the Minor Basilica of the Shrine of Our Lady of Charity, in Santiago de Cuba.
