Online Post Gazette
Thursday, December 03,
1998
The pope is gone, but Christmas comes back to Cuba
If the Grinch who stole Christmas were looking for a home, he couldn't have done better in recent years than Cuba. It wasn't just that its sun-soaked residents couldn't dream about a white Christmas, they couldn't publicly enjoy Christmas at all in a country whose government declared itself atheist in 1962.
Cuba officially banned the celebration of Christmas in 1969, ostensibly because all that good cheer was going to leave the sugar harvest short of manpower. But as a special favor to Pope John Paul II, who visited Cuba in January, Fidel Castro's regime allowed a Christmas holiday last year, without promising that it would be more than a one-time event.
Christmas, though, is nothing if not a time of miracles, and the Cuban leader found that the pope, critic of the U.S. embargo and apostle of social justice, was not such a subversive element after all, and neither was yuletide. Plastic trees and ornaments are now being sold in state stores, and the Communist Party newspaper has endorsed reinstating Dec. 25 as a permanent holiday. The party says that mechanization on the sugar fields has reduced the need for labor.
It's a feeble excuse, but how sweet it is! Who would have thought that Mr. Castro would impersonate another old man with a beard, Santa, and in the process banish the Grinch from the socialist paradise.