As bells rang throughout Havana, Cuba, on Good Friday, only around 100 attended the city’s main cathedral where Cardinal Jamie Ortega presided at the ceremony.
Authorities also allowed Cardinal Jamie Ortega to transmit the Good Friday service on State Television.
It is the first time in 50 years Cubans were granted a public holiday on Good Friday, and this one-time exemption is a direct response to the request of Pope Benedict and his “transcendental visit” to Cuba.
“I’m not Catholic, but I respect them,” said Gladys Ocampo, among Cuban workers who got the day off. “I’m happy to have a holiday I wasn’t counting on.”
Those placing more emphasis on the Good Friday service were members of the ‘Ladies in White’, the country’s most prominent dissident group, who are seeking the release of political prisoners.
“We are here to ask God to enlighten us, to protect us… we will continue this peaceful struggle we have begun for the freedom of our loved ones but also for a new Cuba,” the group’s leader, Berta Soler, told reporters.
Elsewhere in Cuba numbers attending the Good Friday service were higher than at the Cathedral, reports the West Australian.
Magno Felipe Mitjans, a lay worker who described himself as “revolutionary, Christian and Catholic,” said at his parish of San Juan de Letran, “We have received more people, including in comparison with other Good Fridays.”
The Cuban government ended religious holidays in the 1959 revolution that put Fidel Castro into power, however in 1998, and at the request of the visiting then pope, John Paul II, Fidel Castro reinstated Christmas as a public holiday.
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