There has not been a pact, but a commitment by Díaz-Canel, at least that the Pope has promised him that he will not be punished for his sins
14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Desde Aquí, Havana, 26 January 2025 — A young book designer, who is not a specialist in statistics or political mediation, made this comment about the releases from prison promised by the Cuban dictatorship in 2025, the year of the jubilee: “If they announced that they would release 553 inmates from prison, it must have been because a list of names was agreed upon, because if it were a commitment with numbers we would be talking about 500 or perhaps 725, which are the years that have passed since the first jubilee, but 553 is not a number that plays with any Kabbalah.”
In the letter that Miguel Díaz-Canel sent to Pope Francis at the beginning of January, he was informed that on the occasion of the Jubilee of Hope 2025, the decision had been taken to “benefit 553 people convicted in due process of various crimes contemplated by law by granting freedom.”
In the tenth point of the Bull of Invocation for the Jubilee Year 2025, Francis proposed to the governments of the world that “in the Jubilee Year initiatives be undertaken that restore hope; forms of amnesty or forgiveness of punishment aimed at helping people to regain confidence in themselves and in society.”
Seen in this way, it could be said that there was no pact, but rather a unilateral commitment by Díaz-Canel, unless the Pope promised the Cuban dictator that he would not be punished for his sins. But as far as we know, there are only eternal pacts with the devil, and those in literature.
For it to have been something like a pact we would have had to have a third party, in this case President Joe Biden.
For it to have been something like a pact, we would have had to have a third party, in this case President Joe Biden, in the event that he had made a quasi-parallel commitment, also unilateral, to “free” the Cuban government from the sanction that comes with appearing on the list of countries that sponsor terrorism.
To take this hypothesis to its extreme, the Pope would then be the intermediary between the two parties, but there is no letter from Biden to Francis nor any allusion to the fact that the withdrawal of this country from the list was due to the celebration of the jubilee year.
One person here vaguely promising one thing under the non-explicit condition that the other person promises the other thing can be described as anything but a pact, where there are supposed to be guarantees. This perhaps explains why there is no public list of names.
That is why Trump was able to put Cuba’s name back on the list and why the dictatorship was able to freeze the release of those who were so unjustly condemned for political reasons. With such a lack of transparency, the regime also had the door open to appeal to the maneuver of adding common prisoners to the list: people who “in the spirit of the Jubilee” will be able to regain confidence in themselves and in society.
The aforementioned Bull of Invocation to the Jubilee speaks of hope and also of patience. Hopefully, we will not have to wait for Francis to close the Holy Door of the papal Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican on January 6, 2026, the moment in which the Jubilee concludes and which would in some way be the deadline to fulfill this supposed unilateral commitment.
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