Reply #8: My church has a "sister church" connection with its counterpart in Cuba

[Lydia Leftcoast]

and people from my parish have made about six trips up to this point. (A group is going down next week for the consecration of the new bishop of western Cuba.) We seem to have no trouble getting either a renewal of our license or permission to enter Cuba.

However, a couple of years ago, before the country was split into two dioceses, we invited the man who was then the Episcopal bishop of all of Cuba to visit us. It took INCREDIBLE red tape to allow a visit to Minneapolis by an elderly bishop with his whole family remaining in Cuba. Can they really have thought he was going to overstay? Or did the presence of a bishop who could travel outside the country with no problem belie the Bush administration assertion that there was "no religious freedom" in Cuba?

One of these days when my finances are squared around, I hope to join one of these delegations, because it's not a tourist experience. The participants stay in either private homes or church-owned retreat houses and visit parishes in small towns. The returnees felt sad about the poverty (but the widely traveled group members say that it's better than some other Latin American countries and definitely better in terms of health care and education) but thought that the Cuban people were warm, hospitable, and fun.