He "was an important, and at the same time, controversial man of the church, who played a critical role in gaining 'more spaces' so that the Catholic Church in Cuba could exercise her mission of evangelisation within a Marxist nation," says one of Ortega's frequent visitors, Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami.

"He was key to receiving the visit of three popes and negotiating the freedom of political prisoners. May he rest in peace."

Ortega (82), who was Havana's retired archbishop, died on 26 July.

Many visitors, including various US bishops, visited and prayed by his bedside during his last days.

Wenski, who was among them, says Ortega was "a dedicated man of the church and an exemplary Cuban".

After Fidel Castro's communist revolution in 1959, he was jailed for eight months as a suspected opponent of the regime.

He was a leading spokesman for Cuban Catholics on national and international issues during his 35 years as archbishop.

Like popes St John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis, Ortega took the view that the US economic blockade was keeping thousands of people poor while doing little to pressure the Cuban government to expand freedoms and human rights.

As archbishop, he hand-delivered private messages from Pope Francis to then US president Barack Obama and Fidel Castro's brother and successor, Raul Castro, urging them to put aside Cold War-era mistrust and forge a new relationship between the United States and Cuba.

He also used every opportunity possible to plead with the US government to end the blockade. Eventually political tensions thawed and more contact between Cuba and the US recommenced.

Ortega also negotiated with the government for church buildings to be restored and reopened, and this year saw a new Catholic church opened - the first to be built since 1959.

Not everyone appreciated Ortega however.

Some Cubans in exile say he didn't do enough to denounce the island's government.

Some even singled out the date of his death - on the anniversary of an important rebellion that led to the overthrow of Cuba's former government - as proof that he was favourable to the government.

However, Puerto Rico's Archbishop Roberto Gonzalez Nieves says although Ortega was "misunderstood" by Cubans in exile, "he was much loved by the faithful Catholics in Cuba."

Source

• National Catholic Reporter
• National Catholic Reporter
• CNN
• Image: Crux Now

It was 25 years ago this month that communism ceased to be a threat to the west and to the free market.

When sledgehammers started to dismantle the Berlin Wall in November 1989, an experiment with the command economy begun in St Petersburg more than 70 years before was in effect over, even before the Soviet Union fell apart.

The immediate cause for the collapse of communism was that Moscow could not keep pace with Washington in the arms race of the 1980s.

Higher defence spending put pressure on an ossifying Soviet economy.

Consumer goods were scarce. Living standards suffered.

But the problems went deeper.

The Soviet Union came to grief because of a lack of trust.

The economy delivered only for a small, privileged elite who had access to imported western goods.

What started with the best of intentions in 1917 ended tarnished by corruption.

The Soviet Union was eaten away from within.

As it turned out, the end of the cold war was not unbridled good news for the citizens of the west.

For a large part of the postwar era, the Soviet Union was seen as a real threat and even in the 1980s there was little inkling that it would disappear so quickly.

A powerful country with a rival ideology and a strong military acted as a restraint on the west.

The fear that workers could "go red" meant they had to be kept happy.

The proceeds of growth were shared. Welfare benefits were generous. Investment in public infrastructure was high. Continue reading

Sources

• The Guardian
• Image: ieaTV

The same may be said of the planet as a whole.

Whether intellectually or intuitively, many are asking the same question: Where are we heading?

How do we explain the long list of financial, environmental and humanitarian emergencies, epidemics, small and larger conflicts, genocides, war crimes, terrorist attacks and military interventions?

Why does the international community seem powerless to prevent any of this?

There is no simple or single answer to this conundrum, but two factors can shed much light.

The first involves a global power shift and the prospect of a new Cold War.

The second relates to globalisation and the crises generated by the sheer scale of cross-border flows.

Is a new Cold War in the making?

The geopolitical shift has resulted in a dangerous souring of America's relations with Russia and China.

The dispute over Ukraine is the latest chapter in the rapidly deteriorating relationship between Washington and Moscow.

In what is essentially a civil war in which over 3,000 people have been killed, the two great powers have chosen to support opposing sides in the conflict by all means short of outright intervention.

The incorporation of Crimea into Russia, Moscow's decision to use force in Georgia in 2008 and its support for the independence of the two breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia are part of the same dynamic.

The conduct of Russian governments in the Putin era has been at times coercive and often clumsy at home and abroad.

But the United States has also much to answer for. For the last 25 years its foreign policy has been unashamedly triumphalist.

In his 1992 State of the Union address, President George Bush senior declared: "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War". Continue reading

Source

• Joseph Camilleri in The Conversation

Joseph Camilleri OAM was the founding Director of the Centre for Dialogue, La Trobe University.

A lone gunman stepped out, unhurried.

Resting his rifle on the car door, he aimed carefully down the long aisle to where El Salvador's archbishop, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was saying mass.

A single shot rang out.

Romero staggered and fell. The blood pumped from his heart, soaking the little white disks of scattered host.

Romero's murder was to become one of the most notorious unsolved crimes of the cold war.

The motive was clear. He was the most outspoken voice against the death squad slaughter gathering steam in the US backyard.

The ranks of El Salvador's leftwing rebels were being swelled by priests who preached that the poor should seek justice in this world, not wait for the next.

Romero was the "voice of those without voice", telling soldiers not to kill.

The US vowed to make punishment of the archbishop's killers a priority. It could hardly do otherwise as President Reagan launched the largest US war effort since Vietnam to defeat the rebels. He needed support in Washington, which meant showing that crimes like shooting archbishops and nuns would not be tolerated.

The ordering of the murder was blamed on the bogeyman of the story, a military intelligence officer called Major Roberto D'Aubuisson who had, conveniently for Washington, recently left the army.

In the weeks before the murder, he was repeatedly on television using military intelligence files to denounce "guerrillas". Those he accused were often murdered. Romero was near the top of the list.

But US promises to bring justice came to nothing.

With no trigger-man, gun or witnesses, officials claimed lack of evidence.

D'Aubuisson went on to become one of El Salvador's most successful politicians before throat cancer killed him at the end of the civil war 12 years later - the revenge of God, many concluded.

However, new evidence suggests that Washington not only knew far more about the killing than it admitted - but also did nothing to investigate for fear of jeopardising its war effort.

Vital evidence was ignored.

Key witnesses, including the most likely gunman, were killed by those supposed to be investigating.

Seven years and 50,000 deaths after Romero's murder, I was feeling out of my depth as a novice reporter sitting on a park bench talking to a young deserter from Major D'Aubuisson's death squads who called himself Jorge. Continue reading

Image: Salt and Light TV