Cuban bishop: The way people are living ‘is inhumane’; the country ‘has to change’

Bishop Arturo González Amador of Santa Clara, Cuba, said that “Cuba has to change” because the situation has worsened and the way people are living “is inhumane.”

“The situation has not only remained serious and difficult since our message for the past jubilee, but it has worsened,” the prelate noted during Sunday Mass on Feb. 15 in which he also explained the reasons why the Cuban bishops postponed their ad limina visit to the Vatican.

González said the bishops decided to postpone the trip — which had been scheduled for Feb. 16–20 — due to the “complex” situation the country and the region are experiencing. The bishops were concerned that if they all left Cuba and were absent, some “difficult or painful” situation might occur. “This is what motivated us to ask the Holy Father” to postpone the visit, he explained.

“We bishops made a choice: Where should fathers be? Where are they when there is difficulty? By the side of their children. By the side of our people,” he said.

The bishop of Santa Clara said the ad limina visit was initially scheduled for 2027, but Pope Leo XIV, in a gesture of closeness, had moved it forward to February 2026.

“Of course, we bishops were eager to meet with the pope, and the pope had a deep desire to meet with the entire bishops’ conference, but how could we leave our people and everything we are going through? … So we are at peace, we seek the truth, we seek to serve, and this is done by accompanying and praying in our own place, with our people,” the prelate explained during Mass at St. Clare of Assisi Cathedral.

González recalled the Cuban bishops’ appeal to establish a “sincere and effective dialogue.”

“We must sit down, we must talk, we must listen,” the bishop said, “and when we see the suffering of our brothers and sisters, we must take real steps for the common good. We must allow ourselves to be challenged by the suffering of this people and do something for them.”

Cuban model has been a failure

Father Alberto Reyes of the Archdiocese of Camagüey called on the Latin American and European left to accept that “the Cuban model has been a failure,” because “while you refuse to acknowledge this and boast of continuing to tell a dead man, ‘Cheer up, you can go forward!’, my people keep on suffering; my people are dying.”

In a post he published on Facebook, the priest said that Cuba suffers “a life similar to that of nations at war,” in which the population has no control over its present or its future.

He said that members of the left must accept “that Cuba is not what you would have wanted it to be, and that 67 years is more than enough time to demonstrate that it never will be.”

“If you believe that Marxism-Leninism is the solution to the problems of this world, you have every right to seek solutions from it, and I will respect that, but don’t applaud the failure of socialism in my land with speeches of feigned pride. And if you don’t want to say, because it’s so clear, that we have failed, at least remain silent, learn to be quiet, which can also be a respectable option,” he said.

The priest said that, for their part, Cubans “will continue trying to build a Cuba where one can live in truth and freedom, remembering, from time to time, Oscar Wilde when he said: ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.