In his first week as Cuban president, Raul Castro met the Vatican's No. 2 official, who said Havana assured him it would allow some Roman Catholic broadcasts on state-controlled media.
But US Christian groups that have worked for years in Cuba don't expect significant changes in the government's restrictions on religion now that the younger Castro has succeeded his ailing brother Fidel.
Donald Hepburn of the Florida Baptist Convention, a Southern Baptist group that has worked for more than a decade with Baptist churches in western Cuba, said the convention's US staff person just returned from a visit to Cuba and heard little optimism there.
"From talking to our Baptist leadership, they don't believe there's going to be any appreciable change in how the government deals with religious groups," Hepburn said.
The Reverend Larry Rankin, director of mission and justice ministries for the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, said, "the expectation is very low of any great change."
Cuba's single-party, communist government never outlawed religion, but expelled priests and closed religious schools in 1959.
Tensions eased in the early 1990s, when the government removed references to atheism in the Constitution and let believers of all faiths join the Communist Party.
Conditions improved again after Pope John Paul II's visit to Cuba in 1998 -- the first visit by a pope.
Still, the government has kept significant limits on religious life.
Mass evangelizing is banned. The government has withheld permission to build new churches, requiring many Christians to meet instead in small numbers inside homes or in crumbling buildings that predate the revolution.
In some cases, leaders have moved to restrict the number of congregations that can operate in the same neighborhood, Rankin said. And the government-affiliated Cuban Council of Churches controls distribution of imported religious literature.
The visit last week of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Pope Benedict XVI's secretary of state, was Raul Castro's first diplomatic meeting as head of state. But the timing was coincidental: the trip had been scheduled before Cuba's change in power to mark the 10th anniversary of John Paul's visit.
"I don't envision very much change in the near term," said Antonios Kireopoulos of the US National Council of Churches, who has handled international affairs for the council, which represents Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox groups. "We don't know how the new leadership will play out."
Yet even within the government limits, mission groups have been able to undertake some projects.
In some cases, church property that had been taken over immediately after the revolution has been given back. In Havana, a wing of the Methodist church has been returned and the government has given permission for a seminary to be built there, Rankin said.
A Methodist mission team has traveled to Cuba every month or so to finish the seminary, even though other Methodist mission groups were already visiting the island regularly to repair some of the denomination's 125 churches, Rankin said.
"I'm not trying to say all of a sudden the government is friendly," Rankin said. "I just know that they're allowing the extra team to come in and work on the seminary."
The Florida Baptist Convention helps Cuban Baptists start new churches, supports a Havana seminary and provides for retired pastors who have no income, Hepburn said.
The more than 400 Cuban Baptist churches that work with the convention have seen "appreciable growth" in recent years, Hepburn said.
There are no independent, definitive statistics on Cuban religious life. However, it's believed that at least 40 percent consider themselves Catholic, the US State Department's 2007 International Religious Freedom Report said.
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