Praying for a Miracle; Castro opens a new church in Cuba. What does it mean?(Fidel Castro)

Byline: Joseph Contreras

On weekday mornings the House of the Grandparents in Havana's Santo Suarez neighborhood is a beehive of activity. Dozens of gray-haired Cubans arrive early to attend mass at the adjacent Roman Catholic parish church and then tuck into a free breakfast. The brainchild of Father Jesus Maria Lusarreta, the Catholic-run community center opened its doors eight years ago to needy seniors. On a recent morning, one group of retirees sat in a screening room watching a Mexican soap opera, another half-dozen were exercising in a makeshift gym and a couple were waiting to get their hair cut by a volunteer barber. The community center operates on donations from Father Lusarreta's native province in Spain. Over time, says Lusarreta, the House of the Grandparents has won the tacit approval of Fidel Castro's Communist regime. "At first there was some resistance," says the priest. "But the government is pleased with this, and they've told us that we're filling a big gap."

Father Lusaretta, 66, is a man who chooses his words carefully, and with good reason. Relations between church and state in Cuba have been strained ever since Castro and his guerrilla army seized power in 1959. In the early years of Castro's rule, dozens of foreign-born priests and nuns were expelled, hundreds of Catholic schools were shut and many clergymen and lay workers were banished to forced labor camps, along with homosexuals, vagrants and others classified as "social scum."

But the government's public stance toward the Catholic Church and organized religion in general has lightened up considerably since then; last month Castro attended the opening of a new Greek Orthodox cathedral in Havana that was built at the regime's expense. Skeptics dismissed the gesture as a public-relations ploy designed to burnish Castro's image. "[Castro] wants to keep selling the message that he has no problems with religion," says Maria Cristina Herrera, a religious-affairs expert and executive director of the Miami-based Institute for Cuban Studies. "But there are limits that affect the state of religious freedom, and Fidel does everything he can to weaken the [Catholic] church."

That rankles the Catholic ...