Hare in Miami Herald: Cuba and the Church
Paul Webster Hare, Senior Lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, said that Pope Francis will work to establish a path forward for Church-run schools in Cuba.
Hare made the case in an op-ed in the Sept. 13 edition of the Miami Herald entitled “The Other Embargo: Cuba and Church Schools.”
From the text of the article:
This week, Pope Francis is visiting Cuba and the United States, the two countries whose deal he brokered last year. That deal may have been the easy part; he now has to engineer a new path for the Catholic Church in Cuba.
For more than half a century, and for longer than the diplomatic rift with the United States, Cuba has insisted that only the state can legally run schools. The hundreds of thousands of Cuban children who attended church schools before the 1959 revolution included Fidel and Raúl Castro. In 2015, Cuban families still have no choice.
How might the pope approach what will be one of his diplomatic objectives? The name of Felix Varela and the 1966 United Nations International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which Raúl Castro signed for Cuba in 2008, may be good starting points.
You can read the entire op-ed here.
Ambassador Paul Webster Hare was the British ambassador to Cuba from 2001-04. Hare graduated with First Class Honors in Politics and Economics from Oxford University in 1972 and from the College of Law in London in 1976. He worked for 5 years in the private sector, in law and investment banking, before serving for 30 years in the British Diplomatic Service. Learn more about him here.