By Gary Marx
Foreign correspondent

HAVANA -- Five years after Pope John Paul II's visit unleashed hopes of a religious revival and a wider political opening in Cuba, the country's Roman Catholic leadership expresses disappointment at the lack of pluralism but voices unwillingness to challenge the recent crackdown on dissent.

"The church's vision is not to be the opposition party that unfortunately does not exist in Cuba," Cardinal Jaime Ortega said late last month. "I wish there were one, two or three parties with different ideas, but there are not."

Speaking to more than 100 diplomats, cultural figures and others three months after President Fidel Castro's crackdown began, Ortega said the church's only authority is "moral" and "spiritual."

Ortega's comments disappointed some diplomats and left Cuba's tiny dissident movement more isolated than ever after the jailing of 75 opposition figures, independent journalists and others.

Cuban officials say the prisoners are "mercenaries" of a U.S. government preparing to attack the island.

One diplomat, who had hoped for more from Ortega's talk, described it as "passive."

"They [church leaders] are not going to take risks," another diplomat said. "It's not in their DNA."

Ortega's remarks illustrate the cautious and precarious state of the Cuban Catholic Church.

After decades of repression, Catholics, Protestants and adherents of Afro-Cuban religions now practice their faith openly. Many Catholic churches have been repaired. Christmas is celebrated, and baptisms have doubled since Pope John Paul II's 1998 trip, officials say.

Yet while the pope's visit invigorated Catholics, it has not expanded the church's limited role in society, officials and diplomats say.

Since the 1959 revolution, Catholics have not been allowed to build a single church, open schools or obtain access to the state-run media.

Monsignor Jose Perez Riera, adjunct secretary to the Cuban Catholic Conference of Bishops, said government restrictions have caused the number of Catholic
priests to drop from about 800 in 1959 to 300, even though Cuba's population has nearly doubled in 40 years.

"In Cuba there are many communities that don't have priests," he said.

Riera said church officials must obtain government permission for almost everything, including repairing the roof of a church, purchasing a copying machine or
installing a telephone line--restrictions he described as "incomprehensible."

Diplomats and experts said those limitations, coupled with the belief that political change is far off, have caused Ortega and other leaders to avoid involvement in
Cuba's political battles.

Church leaders have not openly backed the democratic reform movement known as the Varela Project despite criticizing the recent dissident arrests and the
executions of three armed ferry hijackers.

While church leaders allow the wives and mothers of imprisoned dissidents to pray each Sunday at a Catholic church, they have neither officially recognized the
women nor allowed them to make public statements on church grounds.

Oswaldo Paya, a Catholic layman who heads the Varela Project, said he is disappointed in the church's hierarchy and with Protestant leaders, saying they should
show courage to support the opposition at a critical time in Cuban history.

"There is fear because they are part of this society," Paya said. "They have the same fear as all Cubans, and they have to free themselves of this fear."

Carlos Samper, an official at the Communist Party's Office of Religious Affairs, denied that church officials are threatened or face limits on their religious work,
though he said private schools, including those run by the church, would never be allowed under a revolutionary government.

While praising the Catholic hierarchy for avoiding involvement in "any political project," Samper criticized some Catholic laymen for anti-government activities.

"Laymen are using religious spaces to carry out activities that are clearly politically counterrevolutionary," he said, referring specifically to Dagoberto Valdes, editor of
a church-affiliated magazine that is harshly critical of the government.

Valdes, an agronomist who lives in the western provincial town of Pinar del Rio, said Cuban authorities forced him to take a menial job collecting and sorting palm
fronds to pressure him into closing the magazine, called Vitral.

Valdes vowed to continue the magazine and to keep on giving residents civics workshops in human rights, pluralism and other subjects so they can experience
something other than what he describes as the "hopelessness" of living in Cuba's failed political and economic system.

"We have to look for alternatives--more social justice, more opportunities for Cubans so that Cubans don't have as the only goal to immigrate," he said. "There is no
country if the citizens leave."

Castro has long had a difficult relationship with the Catholic Church.

Some priests supported Castro's guerrilla war, but the church hierarchy turned against him after the revolutionary government nationalized private property and
closed religious schools.

"The church and powerful Catholic families lost a lot of property, and the church began to resist," said Wayne Smith, a former top U.S. diplomat in Cuba.

Castro, who was educated by Jesuits, expelled scores of foreign-born priests and changed Cuba's constitution to officially define the island as atheist. Cubans who
attended mass, got married in the church or baptized their children risked their jobs and educational opportunities, experts say.

Ortega was imprisoned in a work camp in the 1960s. Valdes said he was prohibited from studying law, sociology, psychology or other liberal arts subjects because
of his Catholicism.

"In a Marxist-Leninist system, they considered that all of us who practiced religion had a disfigured vision of reality," Valdes said.

But in late 1980s, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc sparking an economic free fall here, Cuban officials softened their stand on religion. The Communist Party
began allowing believers to become members, a prerequisite for holding a leadership position in Cuba. In 1992, a constitutional amendment was enacted that
outlawed discrimination based on religious beliefs.

There are three Protestant ministers and several active Catholics in the Cuban National Assembly, the nation's top legislative body, officials say.

"There is a political reconsideration, a political will, to improve relations between the church and the state," said Rev. Raul Suarez, a Cuban lawmaker and prominent
Baptist minister.

Cuban Catholics appear divided on whether their church should push for political change.

Standing outside Havana's colonial-era cathedral just before mass on a recent Sunday, Lazaro Rojas said the pope's visit inspired him, and a year later he was
baptized and received his first Communion.

"The church is like a state, and it needs to press the government to come into some sort of agreement with the opposition," said Rojas, 43, who works in a bakery.

"The dissidents are in prison because they think differently, and thinking differently is part of being human."

Alain Alvarez, a Catholic, said the church should avoid a political confrontation with Cuban authorities.

"The church has no power," the 33-year-old bus driver said. "All the power is with the government."

Gary Marx writes for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune Co. newspaper.

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