Redmaplebuds

My mother wept softly as our plane landed in Havana. It was the summer of 1999, and I was in my early twenties, nearly the same age my mother had been when she was imprisoned by the Communist regime. She later fled to the United States, but the 1998 visit of Pope John Paul II to the island gave her the confidence to return for the first time since 1961. I remember being glued to the television as a vehemently anti-Communist Catholic pope from behind the Iron Curtain visited a nation that had once expelled priests and religious sisters, closed churches, and declared itself an atheist state in its constitution.

After decades of Communist suppression of religion, I found marks of faith in my mother’s hometown.