MIAMI — The key role Pope Francis played encouraging talks between Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro left fractures among his flock in South Florida, where many older Roman Catholics equate the Castro brothers with the devil.
Many Catholics worldwide expressed pride in seeing Francis stir hopes of progress in communist Cuba, but some Cuban-Americans say their spiritual leader betrayed them.
“I’m still Catholic till the day I die,” said Efrain Rivas, a 53-year-old maintenance man in Miami who was a political prisoner in Cuba for 16 years. “But I am a Catholic without a pope.”
Rivas said he cried when Obama surprisingly announced a reversal of a half-century’s efforts to isolate Cuba. Then, when he learned of Francis’ role, he got angry.
Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski acknowledged some Catholics are “concerned or suspicious,” but said many more exiles welcome the breakthrough, despite their suffering.
“The pain is real, but you can’t build a future on top of resentments,” Wenski told The Associated Press in an interview.
The Vatican has been reaching out to Cuba at least since Pope John Paul II, who declared during his historic 1998 visit to the island, “May Cuba, with all its magnificent potential, open itself up to the world, and may the world open itself up to Cuba.” Discussions continued under Pope Benedict XVI, who visited Cuba in 2012. And Francis, the first Latin American pope, has advocated for an end to the U.S. embargo since participating in John Paul’s visit to Cuba as the soon-to-be-named Cardinal of Buenos Aires.
Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega, who is close to Francis, set up the papal visits and has been decisive in improving ties between the church and the officially atheist state since becoming Havana archbishop in 1981. This frustrates some older Catholics who wanted the church to use its unique position inside Cuba to take a harder line.
“The church is contaminated,” said Miguel Saavedra, a 57-year-old Miami mechanic who leads an anti-Castro group and wears a gold cross as a sign of his Catholic faith.
Exiles incensed by the diplomacy openly wonder: Was Francis strong-armed by President Barack Obama? Does he understand how terrible the Castro brothers are? Was he perhaps making a foolhardy bid to cement his change-making image?
“I don’t know what the pope was thinking,” said Jose Sanchez-Gronlier, a 53-year-old lawyer who said he was persecuted for his faith until leaving Cuba as a teenager, and will never forget watching the government seize a convent near his childhood home. “I see a certain naivete in the pope,” he said.
OLYMPIA — If you’ve ever driven into Mount Rainier National Park through the Nisqually entrance, you might know the feeling.
As you pass beneath the massive log arch and begin easing your car through tree-lined curves, there’s a sense of entering another reality.
Susan Dolan says she always feels it.
“Every time I drive through that entrance, I feel touched by the legacy,” said Dolan, who manages the Cultural Landscapes Program for the National Park Service from her office in Seattle.
The feeling is no accident, according to Dolan. It was orchestrated by early Park Service visionaries.
The park’s entrances, its roads with their stone masonry guard walls, the buildings that look as if they might have sprung from the earth — the entire visitor experience — was choreographed to convey presence in a special and maybe even hallowed place.
“It was almost like a Victorian playground of a park,” Dolan said. “The experience was all laid out for you.”
The Mount Rainier style helped set the tone for all the American national parks, Dolan said, and eventually parks all over the world.
That, and the fact that Mount Rainier was the first park to conform so completely to a master plan, led to the establishment in 1997 of the Mount Rainier National Historic Landmark District.
That gave the park the highest possible protection under the National Historic Preservation Act. The level of protection is on a par with the Statue of Liberty.
The designation was an honor, but in the era of climate change, it can seem at times like a burden.
The 100 miles of roads in the historic district are narrow; they were built through low-lying areas vulnerable to flooding. Their historic status makes it next to impossible for the park to change or move them.
As the planet warms and Mount Rainier’s glaciers melt, the roads constantly must be repaired, at great expense.
Dolan is aware of the irony of the situation.
The basis for the Mount Rainier master plan was the idea that everyone should be able to experience the world through the windshield of their automobile. The exhaust from all those cars turned out to be a major cause of climate change.
Within the Park Service, it’s not difficult to find people who think the roads were a bad idea to begin with.
The park was “dealt a bad hand” with the roads, said Paul Kennard, a Park Service geomorphologist who predicts ongoing disaster as climate change continues to melt Mount Rainier’s glaciers.
With regard to decades of futile effort to keep open the park’s Westside and Carbon River roads, park biologist Barbara Samora put it more bluntly: “How much money do you have to spend before you finally just say, ‘Enough is enough?’ “
Dolan takes such skepticism in stride.
“Not everyone coalesces around the same notion of what is good and bad,” she said. “I truly believe people value national parks and want to take a conservative approach to change.”
The Park Service has a legal obligation to protect its cultural resources, Dolan said, and while the National Historic Preservation Act is strict, it is not completely inflexible.
“The idea is not to put these places in a bell jar and keep them entirely unchanged,” she said. “We can’t say that we will be able to manage the Mount Rainier National Historic Landscape in perpetuity. We can say that is our goal.”
“From a preservation standpoint, the roads need to stay where they are,” she said. “Where the debate comes is, ‘How much change is too much?’ It’s a question of degree. They still need to be recognizable as what they were.
“Society as a whole has decided these are significant,” Dolan said. “Which one of us now should be the one to decide, ‘We’re wiping this out?’ “
