Naun’s style is not that of other priests like Alberto Reyes or Lester Zayas, who are much more direct when it comes to criticizing the regime.
14ymedio, Havana, 27 December 2024 — The Catholic priest Leandro Naun made headlines in the independent press abruptly. Three masked men had entered his parents’ house in Santiago de Cuba. They slashed his father with a machete and beat his mother. He was out of the country and told 14ymedio how for him this event, in addition to being a family incident, was confirmation of the absolute moral deterioration in which the country finds itself.
He concluded his story with a gesture: instead of stealing and leaving, the thieves were caught ransacking the refrigerator and devouring the food they found. Naun told the story not so much to vent about the theft as to denounce a wave of violence that has only worsened since then.
Naun’s style is not like that of other priests such as Alberto Reyes and Lester Zayas, who are much more direct when it comes to criticizing the regime. He advances at full speed through the mountains of Santiago de Cuba, distributing food and teaching the guajiros how to improve their lives with few resources. Most of the time, in fact, it is he and his gang of collaborators who provide food or ingredients to prepare it on site.
In almost 70 YouTube videos, the priest has filmed – between laughs and jokes – the hardships of life in the mountains of Santiago. Born in El Cobre, he knows every hamlet like the back of his hand and does not need to say a word about what the camera records: the old women thin to the bone, the grateful faces before a jar of jam or a loaf of bread, the guajiros who welcome him with relief.
In almost 70 YouTube videos, the priest has filmed the harshness of life in the mountains of Santiago
His mantra is that “there is nothing more subversive than living and being happy where many barely survive.” His ideal mission, he told this newspaper: to have waited “in a clearing in the Darien jungle” for the Cubans who were traveling the route of the volcanoes to the United States. For him, the relationship between the Cuban person and the Cuban State is that of a 19th century slave with his master: when he gives him a little rum and a party, he lowers his head and submits. Priests and nuns must, above all, teach Cubans to open their eyes.
For months now, the isolated voices of the clergy and nuns have been the only ones within the Catholic Church to question the government. With a Bishops’ Conference in check by the Office of Religious Affairs of the Communist Party, a Pope who appears to be in favour of the regime and a cardinal who has disappeared from the public scene, priests like Naun are aware of their solitude in the face of any aggressive move by the system.
But Naun doesn’t let that bother him. The text that accompanies his latest video – the artisanal production of a papaya candy – is a profession of faith: “While our friends in other lands talk to us about the latest car models, artificial intelligence, cyborgs and other unimaginable scientific advances, I am going back in time to meet Columbus. We Cubans have the time machine calibrated to the past! I am not creative, I am just trying to survive without perishing in the attempt.”
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