Fidel Castro receives His Holiness Pope John Paul II at the "José Martí" International Airport, in the first visit made by the Holy Father to Cuba.

Juan Pablo honored Cuba with his visit between January 21 and 25, 1998, and was received and fired by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz.

Cubadebate

shares with its readers the speech of the Commander in Chief, Fidel Castro Ruz at the welcoming ceremony for His Holiness John Paul II, held at the "José Martí" international airport.

The land you have just kissed is honored by your presence.

You will not find here those peaceful and kind natural inhabitants that populated it when the first Europeans arrived on this island.

Men were almost all exterminated by exploitation and slave labor that they could not resist;

women, turned into objects of pleasure or domestic slaves.

There were also those who died under the edge of homicidal swords, or victims of unknown diseases imported by the conquerors.

Some priests left heartbreaking testimonies of their protest against such crimes.

Over the centuries, more than a million Africans cruelly uprooted from their distant lands took the place of the now extinct Indian slaves.

They made a considerable contribution to the ethnic composition and the origins of the current population of our country, where the culture, beliefs and blood of all those who participated in this dramatic story were mixed.

The conquest and colonization of the entire hemisphere is estimated to have cost the lives of 70 million Indians and the enslavement of 12 million Africans.

Much blood was spilled and many injustices committed, a large part of which, under other forms of domination and exploitation, after centuries of sacrifices and struggles, still persist.

Cuba, under extremely difficult conditions, managed to constitute a nation.

She fought alone with unsurpassed heroism for her independence.

For this reason, exactly 100 years ago, it suffered a true holocaust in the concentration camps, where a considerable part of its population died, mainly women, the elderly and children;

crime of the colonialists that, not because it was forgotten in the conscience of humanity, ceased to be monstrous.

You, son of Poland and witness to Oswiecim, can understand this better than anyone.

Today, Your Holiness, genocide is attempted once again, pretending to surrender through hunger, disease and total economic suffocation a people that refuses to submit to the dictates and rule of the most powerful economic, political and military power in history, much more powerful than ancient Rome, which for centuries had those who refused to renounce their faith devoured by wild beasts.

Like those Christians atrociously slandered to justify their crimes, we, as slandered as they are, will prefer death a thousand times over renouncing our convictions.

Like the Church, the Revolution also has many martyrs.

Your Holiness, we think the same as you about many important issues in today's world and we are greatly satisfied with this;

in others, our opinions differ, but we pay respectful worship to the deep conviction with which you defend your ideas.

In your long pilgrimage around the world, you have been able to see with your own eyes a lot of injustice, inequality, poverty;

uncultivated fields and peasants without food and land;

unemployment, hunger, disease, lives that could be saved and are lost for pennies;

illiteracy, child prostitution, children working from the age of six or begging to live;

slums where hundreds of millions live in subhuman conditions;

discrimination for reasons of race or sex, entire ethnic groups evicted from their lands and abandoned to their fate;

xenophobia, contempt for other peoples, cultures destroyed or in destruction;

underdevelopment, usurious loans, bad and unpayable debts, unequal exchange, monstrous and unproductive financial speculation;

an environment that is mercilessly and perhaps hopelessly destroyed;

unscrupulous arms trade with disgusting commercial purposes, wars, violence, massacres;

widespread corruption, drugs, vices and an alienating consumerism that is imposed as an idyllic model for all peoples.

Humanity has grown in this century alone almost four times.

Billions of people suffer from hunger and thirst for justice;

the list of man's economic and social calamities is endless.

I know that many of them are the cause of permanent and growing concern of his Holiness.

I lived personal experiences that allow me to appreciate other aspects of his thought.

I was a student at Catholic schools until I graduated from high school.

They taught me then that being a Protestant, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, an animist or a participant in other religious beliefs, constituted a horrible offense, worthy of severe and implacable punishment.

More than once, in some of those schools for the rich and privileged, including myself, it occurred to me to ask why there were no black children there, without having yet been able to forget the unpersuasive answers I received.

Years later, the Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII, addressed several of these delicate questions.

We know the efforts of his Holiness to preach and practice the feelings of respect towards the believers of other important and influential religions that have spread throughout the world.

Respect for believers and non-believers is a basic principle that we Cuban revolutionaries instill in our compatriots.

Those principles have been defined and are guaranteed by our Constitution and our laws.

If difficulties have ever arisen, it has never been the fault of the Revolution.

It is our hope that one day in no school of any religion, anywhere in the world, a teenager will have to ask why there is not a single black, Indian, yellow or white child in it.

Holiness:

I sincerely admire your courageous statements about what happened with Galileo, the well-known errors of the Inquisition, the bloody episodes of the Crusades, the crimes committed during the conquest of America, and about certain scientific discoveries not questioned today by anyone that, in their time, they were the object of so many prejudices and anathemas.

This required the immense authority that you have acquired in your Church.

What can we offer you in Cuba, Your Holiness? 

A people with fewer inequalities, fewer citizens without any protection, fewer children without schools, fewer sick people without hospitals, more teachers and more doctors per population than any other country in the world that His Holiness has visited;

an educated people to whom you can speak with all the freedom you wish to do so, and with the certainty that they possess talent, high political culture, deep convictions, absolute confidence in their ideas and all the conscience and respect in the world to listen to you.

There will be no country better prepared to understand his happy idea, as we understand it and so similar to the one we preach, that the equitable distribution of wealth and solidarity between men and peoples must be globalized.

Welcome to Cuba (applause).

(SHORTHAND VERSIONS - COUNCIL OF STATE)

Receives His Holiness Pope John Paul II at the "José Martí" International Airport

Photo: Jose Goitia/ AP

His Holiness receives Pope John Paul II at the "José Martí" International Airport, on the first visit made by the Holy Father to Cuba.

First visit made by the Holy Father to Cuba.

Photo: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

Speech at the welcoming ceremony for His Holiness John Paul II, held at the "José Martí" international airport

Fidel receives his holiness

His Holiness receives Pope John Paul II at the "José Martí" International Airport, on the first visit made by the Holy Father to Cuba.

His Holiness receives Pope John Paul II at the "José Martí" International Airport, on the first visit made by the Holy Father to Cuba.

Photo: Kennerly/Getty Images

His Holiness receives Pope John Paul II at the "José Martí" International Airport, on the first visit made by the Holy Father to Cuba.

On video, Cuba knows no fear