The regime takes advantage of the mistake made by the fraternity in its attempt to dismiss the Grand Master
14ymedio, Juan Izquierdo, Havana, August 1, 2024 — The eyes of the Cuban Freemasons are on the meeting that the members of the fraternity in Havana, including several senior officials, will hold this Thursday with Caridad Diego, the Communist Party’s head of the Office of Religious Affairs. The agenda: mediating the institutional crisis that began in January with the theft of $19,000 from the office of Grand Master Mario Alberto Urquía Carreño, which now threatens to stoke the schism between the two highest Masonic authorities in the country, the Grand Lodge and the Supreme Council of Degree 33.
The mediation of Diego, the eternal apparatchik of the regime in this position, assumes that the Masonic problem is already in the hands of the Communist Party and not of the Ministry of Justice, whose Registry of Associations has failed to resolve the crisis through successive interventions. For the historian and exiled Mason Gustavo E. Pardo Valdés, the Party has a clear objective: to create the image that “the Office of Religious Affairs is conciliatory and is the savior of Masonic unity.”
According to Pardo, several of the Freemasons on the Island believe that the Party will take “advantage and benefit” from the exchange. In any case, he explains, the meeting – which will take place at the headquarters of the provincial government of Havana – will be “very interesting.” “The Freemasons of the capital have been ’invited’ to this meeting. There you will be able to know or intuit who is behind this chaos,” says Pardo.
Entrenched in his office and with the support of several senior officials who recognize his authority – including his secretary, Juliannis Reinaldo Galano – Urquía Carreño has continued to legislate and issue decrees against the lodges that oppose him. Last week, at least 200 Freemasons from several provinces asked the Grand Master to leave his office and face those who asked for his resignation peacefully. His answer came a few days later.
Four decrees, signed by Urquía Carreño and ratified by Galano, sanctioned two lodges that refused to accept his authority with a measure of suspension. The lodges are Evolution, in Artemisa, and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, General Guillermo Moncada and Luz, from Havana.
According to Pardo, Cuban Freemasonry has been shipwrecked for several months due to serious ethical and legal errors of its members, not only of the Grand Master. The four lodges that agreed to the non-recognition of Urquía Carreño acted, in the light of Masonic Legislation, illegally, whatever their intentions.
Pardo defended this opinion in an article published last Sunday, in which he reminded the Cuban Freemasons that they were bound by obedience to the person occupying the Grand Lodge. There were other legal remedies that should have been used to oust Urquía Carreño, and violating the Masonic Code, he emphasizes, only complicates the matter.
“Urquía Carreño is the Grand Master with all the powers set by the Masonic Constitution,” Pardo summarizes. Until his departure from the post is achieved through the legal channels, he has the right to stay there.
Pardo alludes to Title VIII of the Masonic Constitution, which provides that to dismiss a Grand Master it is necessary for no less than 50 lodges to formulate an accusation, which is sent to the president of the Supreme Court of Masonic Justice.
After the Supreme Court analyzes the case, an investigating judge will be appointed, who will take the relevant statements and submit the result to the president of the Court. The decision will have to be approved by at least two-thirds of the members of the Grand Lodge, who will make up the Grand Jury. This process was not respected.
It is not known for sure how many Freemasons support the current Grand Master. In Havana, Pardo explains, there are 111 lodges in which approximately a third of Cuban Freemasons operate. “If you look carefully at the recording of the protest in the Grand Lodge building, you can see that there are 140 to 200 Freemasons, many of them members of the Supreme Council.”
Cuban Freemasonry has a total of 324 active lodges and around 20,000 members
Cuban Freemasonry has a total of 324 active lodges and about 20,000 members. The Supreme Council, for its part, has between 3,500 and 4,000 members throughout the country, according to Pardo. Since 2010, when it was known that Grand Master Manuel Collera Vento was actually an agent of State Security, Freemasonry has lost about 9,000 members. “Now something similar will happen, because it will increase the control of the Party,” he says.
To be part of the Supreme Council a mason must go through the first three degrees – apprentice, companion and teacher – which is what is known as “symbolic” Freemasonry. Those three steps are the foundation of Freemasonry and are under the authority of the Grand Lodge. A Freemason cannot belong to the Supreme Council without being affiliated with the Grand Lodge; hence a schism between both Masonic bodies can be complicated, explains Pardo.
“In fact, if the Grand Master decrees it, the members of the symbolic Freemasonry cannot visit the Supreme Council, and they would not even have temples in which to carry out their work,” he explains.
Among the Cuban Freemasons there are those who have recommended that the Supreme Council definitively separate from the Grand Lodge and constitute a separate Masonic body – what is called the Great East. For Pardo, this path would be a mistake. If the Supreme Council carried out this maneuver, it would become an irregular Great East, which would start on the left foot and not have the slightest recognition by international Freemasonry.
“They don’t even own the place where their offices are located,” says Pardo. “Even the building of the Supreme Council in Jovellar 164, between Espada and San Francisco, belongs to the Washington Lodge, subordinate to the Grand Lodge.” In fact, Pardo observes, when Urquía Carreño suspended the Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Recognition between the two Masonic bodies, he turned the Supreme Council, in practice, into an irregular institution in the eyes of international Freemasonry.
There is one way to oust Urquía Carreño: Masonic Law. That has not been the way that the Supreme Council has chosen. In Pardo’s opinion, the high court has made one mistake after another, starting with the management of the money of the Llansó Masonic Elderly Asylum, whose theft triggered the crisis.
Pardo is blunt: “There was a violation of the Asylum regulations by José Ramón Viñas, who presides over the Asylum and the Supreme Council.” Viñas, who has been in the sight of the State Security for his criticism of the Government, was the one who accused Urquía Carreño of stealing the $19,000. Since then, both senior officials have been in a struggle.
“There was a violation of the Asylum regulations by José Ramón Viñas, who presides over the Asylum and the Supreme Council”
“The Treasury of the Elderly Asylum had the obligation to deposit its funds – both in national currency and in foreign currency – in the corresponding branch of the state bank . Who participated in that violation? Viñas and his governing board, who agreed to deposit the currency in the safe that exists in the Grand Master’s office,” analyzes Pardo.
“Why wasn’t the money kept in the safe of the Grand Treasury? Wasn’t that money the property of the Grand Lodge? Freemasons know that the assets of the institution are managed in the way that best suits the officials in charge of them. But this opened the possibility that Urquía Carreño, who is not a saint, would be used as a scapegoat to unleash the current crisis,” he reflects.
If anything has become clear in the seven months of tension, it is that the problem is no longer just Masonic. The Government has tried to intervene – first from the legal angle, now from the Party – and has arrested or intimidated several Masons opposed to Urquía Carreño, such as the writer Ángel Santiesteban.
Pardo has no doubt that the Office of Religious Affairs and State Security has a large part of the responsibility in the crisis. “Since 1959,” he explains, “infiltration into Freemasonry has been a goal of the State. We now see that this practice is paying off.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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