BEATIFICATION OF ARCHBISHOP ROMERO,
MAY 23, 2015
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| The Marques de Comillas enters Havana Harbor. |
When Maria
Lopez Vigil published her collective biography of Archbishop Romero, Memories in Mosaic, she realized she was
missing a particular fragment of the mosaic. “When I wrote the book I learned that in 1943 Archbishop Romero”—López
Vigil later explained—“had passed through
Cuba.” However, “I was frustrated not
to find any witnesses who could tell me more about this singular episode in
Romero’s life and I had to give up on including the Cuban piece in the portrait
I was composing,” the Cuban-Nicaraguan writer lamented.
Now «Super Martyrio» tackles the subject, and
we uncover an odyssey for Romero, the new priest traveling back to his country.
Pulling back the veil, we publish here for the first time dates, locations, and
details that paint the complicated scenario. Some questions beget more
questions. Were Romero’s travails triggered by an accusation by future Nobel
laureate Ernest Hemingway? Was Romero an indirect victim of the persecution of
the Spanish Church? Why did Romero never talk about this brush with state
repression?
Ciao, Roma!
“Europe and almost the whole world were a
conflagration during the Second World War,” Romero recalled many years
after the events. “Those who could return
to their homelands gambled with the perils of the adventure.” The adventure
for Father Romero began when he checked out of the Latin American College on Monday
August 16, 1943, over a year after he was ordained a priest.
Traveling
with his best friend, Father Rafael Valladares and another Salvadoran, Father Mauro
Yanez Acosta, he began his journey back after 6 years of study in Rome—a stay extended by the Second World
War. They flew in an Italian plane from Rome to Barcelona. In Spain, they lingered
for several days visiting Madrid and Bilbao, where they called on the famous
Jesuit, Fr. Joseph N. Guenechea, the spiritual director of Fr. Pedro Arrupe,
and author of several books (including one entitled “Poverty of the Liturgy and
Clergy in Spain”).
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| Romero aboard the Marques de Comillas. |
Crossing the Atlantic aboard the Marqués de Comillas
On Sunday
August 29th, they sailed from Bilbao bound for the Americas aboard the S.S. Marqués de Comillas. A photograph taken
at the time shows Romero and Valladares aboard the ship, along some thirty
other priests and seminarians. It was smooth sailing, and the new priests were surely
eager and excited to come home to their loved ones after a long absence.
They traveled
in comfort. The Comillas had a capacity
for 570 passengers. With an average speed of 16 knots, it made the
transatlantic crossing rather slowly (in its prior trip before Romero’s, it had
taken 25 days to cross the ocean). But the trip was very pleasant. The single
stack steamship had a movie theater, a hall, a music room and a dining room
that looked like a courtyard with Moorish arches, decorated in the style of the
manor houses of Northern Spain. It had a reputation for serving great food. On
the landing of the grand staircase that connected the hall to the music room,
there was a large painting, the work of the La Coruña painter Fernando Alvarez
de Sotomayor, showing Sir Claudio López Bru, the second Marquis of Comillas, who
is now in process of beatification.
The
atmosphere aboard the ship reflected the domesticity of Spanish life: roosters crowed
in the cargo hold, portraits of Generalissimo Francisco Franco adorned the
rooms of some of the crew, and banners with slogans like “Go, Spain!” decorated
the hallways. Spanish was heard in the corridors, which were all carpeted in red.
While some crew members were zealous Franco supporters, the captain, Gabriel
Guiscafré Rosello, 60, practiced neutrality both with respect to politics and to
the military conflicts that shook the world. That diplomatic attitude must have
allowed him to get along with the myriad nationalities aboard.
Romero and
Valladares felt at ease on the Comillas,
thinking that they had left the danger of the European wars behind on that
continent. What they did not imagine is that the Atlantic was a sea of
intrigue and conspiracy, awash in rumors of spies and infiltration, and a
real ancillary war between Allied ships and Axis submarines, especially the infamous
Germans “U-Boats.”
There was
also a great current of helpless souls trying to escape persecution and
extermination at the hands of the Nazis. In 1939, Cuban authorities had refused
entry to 900 Jews aboard the S.S. St. Louis who were forced to turn back into Hitler’s
clutches. The Marqués de Comillas was
the transport for many refugees. On the trip Romero was on, there was a Polish Jewish
family, a mother of 36, Peśla Parmes, and her daughter Helena, 12, with a final
destination in the Bronx, New York, where Peśla’s sister, Edith Foreman who had
paid their fares, awaited them. If she were still alive, the little girl would
be 85 years old today.
Perhaps
Romero and Valladares knew all this, but preferred not to think about it. “When I was a seminarian I heard a story that
comes to mind given the circumstances of today,” Romero recounted in May 1979. “It was a story about a sailor who was sent to fix something high on the
mast; as he climbed high up and looked down at the roiling sea, he became dizzy
and was about to fall,” Romero said. “When
the captain noticed this, he told him, «Young fellow, look upward!» and that
was his salvation. When he looked upward he could no longer see the heaving
ocean, and he did the job calmly.”
Trinidad and Jamaica
The first
port of call in the Americas was the island of Trinidad on Saturday, September 18th.
If the Salvadorans presumed they were safe because they were back on their own
continent, the European war made its presence felt in the intrusion of the
searches they faced upon docking.
It turns out
that the reassuring atmosphere of the Marqués
de Comillas was misleading. The ship itself was the focus of suspicion. The
previous December, the future Nobel Prize in Literature, Ernest Hemingway, acting
as an amateur secret agent on his fishing boat, was watching the transatlantic traffic
and supposedly detected suspicious activity on the ship that Romero would sail nine
months later—the Marqués de Comillas.
In a report submitted to the FBI and passed along to Cuban authorities,
Hemingway asserted that he saw the Marqués
de Comillas in an exchange with a German submarine, either refueling it or transferring
German spies. A Nazi spy had been arrested and executed in Cuba that year
(1942).
The fear of
U-Boat incursions was also at its peak. Between mid-1942 to early-1944, seven
Cuban ships were sunk by German submarines. Hemingway’s accusation against the Marqués de Comillas was taken seriously
and was thoroughly investigated. When the Comillas
docked in Havana nine months before Romero’s trip, an FBI agent questioned the
40 crew members and 50 passengers aboard the ship with Cuban cooperation regarding
the alleged exchange. The investigation came to nothing, and the authorities
seem to have dismissed the Hemingway report. However, he insisted on its
accuracy and continued to monitor the Comillas
in 1943. In fact, in the days Romero was sailing into Trinidad and Jamaica aboard
the Comillas, Hemingway was setting
out on his last patrol of the Cuban coast. There is no evidence that the
allegations of the Nobel laureate were still being taken seriously so late in 1943,
but they were typical of the concerns of the time.
[Hemingway
wrote a novel called Islands in the
Stream, published posthumously, that was inspired by these events.
Hemingway committed suicide in 1961. Msgr. Valladares passed away and the Marqués de Comillas burned off the Barcelona
coast that same year.]
Detained in Cuba
What is clear
is that Romero and Valladares were arrested when they disembarked in Cuba after
having made a second American stop in Kinston, Jamaica. They arrived in Havana
on Tuesday September 21st. They were going to transfer to another ship there.
Romero’s biographer describes the perplexity of the two at their arrest: “They did not understand anything that was
happening.” [Delgado, Óscar
A. Romero: biografía, pp. 25-26.] Valladares’ biographer agrees: “incomprehensible reasons” caused them to
be detained. [De Paz Chávez, La
ciudad donde se arrancan corazones, 2013.]
If Romero and Valladares
did not understand what was happening, the reasons for their arrest remain
difficult to process today. The reasons seem as inscrutable as those for the
arrest of Christ!
The most
accepted theory is that Romero and Valladares were arrested because their travel
had originated in Italy, an Axis country (Delgado, Paz, Struckmeyer). But could
this be the reason they were suspected? A new Romero biography makes the point
that on September 9th, Italy had signed an armistice, crossing over to the
Allied side. [Mata, Monseñor
Óscar Romero: Pasión por la Iglesia, 2015, p. 33.] When
the Marqués de Comillas arrived in
Havana on September 21, this would have been known to the Cuban authorities. In
fact, Cuba freed several prominent Italians who had been in detention,
including members of the Italian royal family, in October of that year. Nonetheless,
it was a fact that Cuba had had an internal policy of detention for Axis nationals
as of that date, and that despite the armistice with Italy, it remained
suspicious of Italians, some of whom remained fascist partisans even after the treaty.
Romero and
Valladares were thoroughly searched and interrogated by the Investigation
Service for Enemy Activities (SIAE) of the Central Division of the Police, and
their cassocks and priestly attire proved insufficient to spare them. In fact, they
were not the first priests aboard the Comillas
to be so accused. In the ocean liner’s previous crossing, in June 1943, the
Cuban authorities had arrested three Spanish Dominican priests, after
supposedly finding pro-Hitler propaganda among their belongings. At any rate,
it is clear that Romero and Valladares were selected from among the other
passengers for this treatment: the Marqués
de Comillas continued on its path, sailing into New Orleans on September 28
and was back in Europe in October without further incident. (This refutes
Santiago Mata, when he asserts that “The
ship … was detained in Cuba, the crew and passengers of the vessel jailed.”
-Op. Cit.).
Other sources
mention that Romero and Valladares were “suspected of espionage” (Brockman,
Morozzo, Lopez Vigil). It is unclear whether such suspicion was generalized (because
they came from Italy) or prompted by something in particular the Salvadorans
said, or by something that was found among their possessions. It is hard to
fathom the two would have given authorities reason for such suspicions. Both
were avid anti-Nazis, who admired Pope Pius XI precisely because he faced-off
with the fascists, vowing that “nobody is going to laugh at the Church” during his
papacy.
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| The Tiscornia Camp. |
The “Tiscornia” Camp
Romero and
Valladares were initially taken to the Tiscornia Immigration Station. This was
the central processing center for all refugees and immigrants who arrived on
the island. It was on the other (northeast) side of the Bay of Havana, in what
is now the site of the Cristo de La
Habana monument (in the Casablanca neighborhood).
The camp
buildings were constructed in the style of U.S. Army barracks, surrounded by
barbed wire, and they housed refugees who arrived on the island without
documentation or resources, while their status was investigated. A report of
the Joint Relief Committee of the time details contemporary conditions at the
camp in May 1942, indicating the presence of about 450 detainees, some of whom
were there for several months. Inmates were not allowed to communicate with the
outside, as they were unable to have visitors or to send or receive letters or
use the telephone or telegraph. “While it
is understandable that the Cuban Government wishes to check very carefully on
the identity of all enemy nationals entering Cuban territory,” the report reads,
“it cannot be overlooked that the
situation of the refugees in Tiscornia is far from good.” The report
specifically mentions that the food was poor by European palates.
All reports
agree that the nutrition Romero and Valladares received was inadequate—so much
so, that it caused health problems for both young men. “The food was very poor,” recalls Gaspar Romero, the younger brother
of Blessed Romero. “Bishop Valladares became
seriously ill, and Oscar became very thin.” Valladares got so sick that
even back in El Salvador in 1944, he needed extensive time to recover. “Tiscornia was a relocation camp devoid of
resources and facilities,” recalls a refugee detained in the place. [Galega do Ensino Magazine, No. 35 - May
2002.] The Spanish writer Eva Canel is even more blunt: “Tiscornia was a name of foreboding!”
Forced labor
Romero
biographies mention another detail of his stay in Cuba: he had to perform “forced labor,” says Maria Lopez Vigil, “washing toilets, mopping, sweeping.” Despite
being familiar tasks, these bathroom cleaning assignments were so grueling that
they left both priests exhausted every night. This information suggests that
Romero and Valladares were moved to another place, a labor camp.
From
Tiscornia, detainees were sent to other detention camps. The less committed
were sent to the Torrens Reformatory in Wajay (province of Havana), a camp
which was subsequently reconfigured for juvenile rehabilitation. Street youths
and minors were brought there, using the need to teach them a craft as a
pretext for detaining them (typically they did work proper to the farm, on the
fields and raising different animals). But the site also held approx. 3,000
Germans, 1,370 Italians and some 250 Japanese and Koreans after the passage of
a special law in reaction to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. If Romero and
Valladares had to perform forced labor, they may have spent time in the Torrens
camp. But, this is speculation.
Rescued by Redemptorists
Romero and
Valladares’ salvation came when, after about a month of detention, a
Redemptorist missionary working in the camp where they were being held confirmed
that Romero and Valladares were priests. The Redemptorists saw to it that Romero
and Valladares were taken out of the camp and to a hospital in Havana, where
they stayed for a short time getting medical attention.
But their
release was probably not due solely to the fact that they were priests. It is
hard to believe that their status as priests would not have been evident from
the first search of their belongings. A photo of Romero and Valladares aboard
the Comillas shows the two wearing
clerical garb, and both priests were known in their youth to be strict in their
attire, always wearing their cassocks or at least the Roman collar. This begs
the question whether the reason Romero and Valladares were not released earlier
by virtue of their being priests is that they were being harassed because of it. If so (and this is not
confirmed), this episode could extend the “previous martyrdom” of Romero,
giving a new dimension to Pope Francis’ remarks that “Archbishop Romero’s martyrdom did not occur precisely at the moment of
his death,” because it included “a
martyrdom of witness, of previous suffering, of previous persecution.”
This “martyrdom”
would have occurred under a different dynamic. The Fulgencio Batista of that
time was different from the Batista that Fidel Castro overthrew in 1959. Batista was
in his first term (1940-1944), legitimately elected from the
Democratic-Socialist Coalition, with ministers from the Cuban Communist Party
in his cabinet. His government had an innate enmity to the conservative faction
of the Spanish Civil War, of which the Church was suspected of being a part and
persecuted therefor. Romero and Valladares had visited committed Spanish
clergy. If they were harassed because they were priests, it may have been a
ripple of that conflict.
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| Romero in Yucatan. |
The Last Journey of Oscar Romero
Finally
released, Romero and Valladares traveled by boat from Cuba to Yucatan, Mexico,
and from there overland to El Salvador, arriving in their homeland on Thursday
December 23rd, “like Christmas presents” for family members who had given them up
for dead. Guadalupe Romero, Romero’s mother, had already mourned his loss. But
Romero entered Ciudad Barrios triumphantly on January 4, 1944, to a popular
celebration held in his honor. His hometown’s joy when the lost traveler reappeared
was uncontainable, Gaspar Romero recalls. “Oh!
The whole town stopped working to come out and greet him.”
Incredibly, Archbishop
Romero, who bravely denounced prolonged detentions without due process, never
spoke publicly about his own experience of this abuse. Instead of talking about
himself, he lamented the experience of the “mothers,
wives and children, from one end of the country to the other [who] have walked the way of the cross searching
for their dear ones without finding any answer whatever.” (May 14, 1978 Homily.)
Contrary to the Salvadoran constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, “Persons have been detained
illegally for more than thirty days,” Romero decried. It was an injustice which
he knew firsthand.
