Pope Francis Meets Fidel Castro During Cuba Visit

With his arrival in Havana, where he was greeted by President Raul Castro, he became the third pontiff to visit Cuba in the past 17 years – a remarkable record for any country, much less one with a small community of practicing Catholics.

The Vatican stressed that no official meeting had been planned with the dissidents.

Pope Francis presented Fidel Castro with a link to the past Sunday: poems by a Jesuit teacher forced to flee Cuba after his one-time student – the now-ailing Marxist icon – led a revolution.

An estimated 2 million Cubans have left the island since the 1959 revolution with some 1.3 million now living overseas , a lot of them in the United States, where many exiles remain bitterly estranged from their homeland.

Three Cuban dissidents were arrested Sunday as they approached Francis shouting “Freedom!” when he arrived for mass in his popemobile.

The Pope will leave Cuba on Tuesday afternoon and will continue his in trip in the USA , when he ” ll visit the Congress, the White House and United Nations.

Francis presided over the evening prayer service in Havana’s 18th century cathedral, where he broke from prepared remarks and spoke off-the-cuff at length for the first time during his trip to Cuba.

“If you are different than me, why don’t we talk?”

Castro, who wore a blue-and-white track suit jacket, gave him a copy of “Fidel and Religion“, a 1985 book of interviews with a Brazilian priest which lifted a taboo on speaking about religion in Cuba, then officially atheist.

During mass in Havana’s Revolution Plaza, Francis told Cubans to serve one another and not ideology, a subtle jab at Communism.

Pope Francis recently held a mass in Cuba attended by more than 300,000 people. Francis thanked Castro for his welcome at Havana’s airport on Saturday and for the Cuban president’s pardons for 3,522 prisoners convicted of relatively minor crimes, in their exchange before a private meeting.

“Like his predecessors… the pope has not met any dissidents”.

Jose Daniel Ferrer, head of the Santiago-based opposition group Patriotic Union of Cuba, said Monday that the man who got close to the pope was a member of his organization.

On Tuesday, the Pope will fly to Washington, a visible sign of the detente he has helped broker between Cuba and the United States.

“I urge political leaders to persevere on this path and to develop all its potentialities as a proof of the high service they are called to carry out on behalf of peace and the well-being of their peoples, of all America, and as an example of reconciliation for the entire world“, Francis added. He delivered mass to hundreds of thousands of people on Havana’s Revolution Square, met both Castro brothers, gave an off-script speech to local clergy and then addressed a crowd of young Cubans.