GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Pope Benedict XVI will end a two-day Cuban visit on Wednesday 28 March with an open-air Mass in Revolution Square in Havana and an unscheduled meeting with former leader Fidel Castro, the Associated Press reports.
The plaza’s famous image of revolutionary leader Che Guevara now has a huge poster of the country’s patron saint, the Virgin of Charity of Cobre, opposite it. The papal visit coincides with the 400th anniversary of her apparition as a statue.
The leader of the Catholic Church met for an hour on Tuesday with Fidel’s brother, Raul Castro, the current head of state. The pope asked that Good Friday be made a national holiday. The Cuban regime agreed to reintroduce Christmas as a holiday, following the last papal visit, by John Paul II in 1998, after banning it for nearly 30 years.
Only ten percent of Cuba’s population is Catholic today and Benedict’s visit to Cuba is widely seen as an effort to improve relations between the Catholic Church and the secular socialist state and to renew the church.
Links to other sources: The Telegraph, CNN, BBC, Vatican
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Santiago Penados de Rivero, 10, wanted to join his mother Thursday morning 11 November, like so many other children in Geneva and Vaud who took part in the bring your kid to work day, which 11 Swiss cantons offered last week. Juliette de Rivero, his mother, is the Geneva advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, an NGO, and her work day included plans to meet with other advocacy groups representatives as well as some UN member government agencies in her role observing the UN Human Rights Council meetings at the UN, reports Foreign Policy magazine. But Santiago was stopped at the door and the pair were told he did not have the right to enter.
The guard told his mother that “Geneva ends when you step foot in this building. This is not Switzerland,” reports Foreign Policy. The UN communications office in Geneva later clarified that while UN employees and diplomats may bring their children, other children must have advance security clearance. Santiago, for his part, sat down and wrote a letter of protest, arguing for his rights.
In canton Vaud in 2010 more than 14,000 children joined their parents at work for the day. Figures for Geneva and for this year are not yet available.
The death toll from the 27 February earthquake in Chile has doubled to over 700, according to the country’s president, Michelle Bachelet, and the number is expected to keep rising. The airport in the capital, Santiago, has reopened, but the country is struggling to cope with disrupted transport, food shortages in hardest hit areas and looting.
Links to other sites: BBC, CS Monitor
Chile has been shaken by a midnight (06:34 GMT) earthquake that measured 8.8 on the Richter scale, say geologists in the US and China, who have upgraded their measurements of it. The earthquake was 1,000 times more powerful than the one that struck Haiti in January, experts said on CNN. The quake hit central Chile, 100km north of the city of Concepcion, and 350 from Santiago, the capital. The Chinese Earthquake Administration says it occurred at and “the epicenter was 35.8 degrees south latitude and 72.7 degrees west longitude, with a depth of 33 kilometers.” Sixty-four people are reported dead but numbers are expected to rise.
The airport in Santiago, which was was shaken for 90 minutes, is closed until further notice and according to the BBC, “Tsunami warnings have been issued for Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and Pacific island nations. Alerts were also earlier issued for Antarctica and Central America.”
Reuters updates and background
Links to other sites: BBC, New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald, Xinhua
Thousands joined the cortege to rebury singer and filmmaker Victor Jara in Santiago, Chile Saturday 5 December, 36 years after his wife had to hastily bury him and flee the country. He was tortured and shot one week after Augusto Pinochet came to power in a coup against Salvatore Allende, in 1973. His murderers have never been named.
