204 Chapter 9
ticipants in the peaceful protest marches of the Ladies in White), the
Cuban Catholic Church emerged as the independent, mediating insti-
tution that was able to negotiate with key figures in the revolutionary
government, including President Raul Castro, for the movement of
many political prisoners to locations closer to their families and in
some cases to secure the outright release of sick or elderly prisoners.
These efforts culminated in mid-July when the Cuban government
announced that the final 52 (out of 75) dissidents still imprisoned
from the March 2003 crackdown on dissidence (known as the ‘Black
Spring’) would be released, an action that prompted Cuban dissident
Guillermo Farinas to end his well-publicized 134-day hunger strike.
This new, more prominent role for Catholic church leaders in con-
tentious political issues should not surprise close observers of Cuban
politics and society. The Cuban Catholic Church's role as a mediating
institution between the Cuban government and the community of dis-
sident activists on the island is the result not only of the historical evo-
lution of church-state relations during the revolutionary era but of a
deliberate set of decisions on the part of the church hierarchy to for-
mulate a strategy that I call indirect confrontation, to maintain an
independent voice for the church on political issues without engaging
in direct or overtly caustic confrontational rhetoric or organized activ-
ities. In essence, the success of the Cuban Catholic Church's recent
efforts to intervene on behalf of dissidents and political prisoners has
been part of an almost 25-year strategy to carve out for itself the role
of political mediator in Cuban society through indirect confrontation
with the Cuban government.
During the last quarter of the 20th century, a great deal of scholarly
attention was focused on the role of the Catholic Church in leading
the fight against authoritarianism in many parts of Latin America and
Eastern Europe (Smith 1982; Mainwaring 1986; Mainwaring and
Wilde 1989; Smith 1991; Gill 1998). The Cuban Catholic Church has
been conspicuously absent from this literature, for many years consid-
ered by observers to be a stagnant church far removed from the front-
lines of political confrontation. However, leaders of the Cuban