Cuban President Raul Castro expressed, on behalf of the Cuban people, a deep gratitude and esteem for the three-day apostolic visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Cuba, after Pope met Cuba’s legend Fidel Castro, slammed U.S. embargo on Cuba.

Havana / NationalTurk – Raul Castro highlighted the Pope’s visit to Cuba ang the atmosphere of mutual understanding emerged between Pope and Cuba. While Cuban People bid their farewell to Pope Benedict XVI and Cuban president Raul Castro saw Pope Benedict XVI off, Fidel Castro and Benedict XVI had already met in Havana.

Pope Benedict called for an end to the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba and met with revolutionary icon Fidel Castro on Wednesday as he ended a trip in which he urged the communist island to change.

Fidel Castro, the president’s older brother, and the leader of Cuban Revolution visited Pope Benedict at the Vatican embassy where the two octogenarian world leaders with widely divergent political views chatted for 30 minutes in what a Vatican spokesman called a ‘ very cordial ‘ atmosphere.

“What does a pope do?” Fidel Castro asks Pope Benedict in Havana

They discussed serious issues such as Church liturgy and the state of the world, but also joked about their age — Benedict is 84. At one point, Fidel Castro asked a simple question – what does a pope do?

‘ The pope told him of his ministry, his trips, and his service to the Church,’ stated Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi.

Photographs revealed the elder Castro and the pope shaking hands and smiling, with Fidel Castro wearing a dark track suit and a scarf around his neck that seemed out of place on a warm day.

Two assistants helped Fidel Castro out of his car, when he arrived with a green Mercedes. Fidel Castro has been in frail health since 2006, the help continued even up the steps of the stately white embassy in Havana’s Miramar district.

The friendly meeting of a Pope and a Legendary Revolution Leader contrasted with the start of Pope Benedict’s visit to Cuba when he sharply criticized the communist system that Fidel Castro installed in Cuba in place after taking power in a 1959 revolution and continues to defend the system in Cuba as the last, best hope of mankind.

Pope in Cuba : Public Mass, Meeting with Raul and Fidel Castro, US lashing 84 year old was busy in Havana

Pope also spoke prior to the meeting with Castro at a public Mass in Havana’s sprawling Revolution Square where the Vatican declared 300,000 people gathered to hear the 84-year-old pontiff.

In a trip laced with calls for change in Cuba, his last message was aimed at the United States, its longtime ideological foe, which for 50 years has imposed a trade embargo trying to topple the Caribbean island’s communist government.

Speaking in a departure ceremony at a rainy Havana airport, Benedict said Cuba could build “a society of broad vision, renewed and reconciled,” but it was more difficult “when restrictive economic measures, imposed from outside the country, unfairly burden its people.”

“The present hour urgently demands that in personal, national and international co-existence we reject immovable positions and unilateral viewpoints,” the German pope, dressed in white vestments, said in his soft voice and heavily accented Spanish.

Pope with Raul Castro : Improved Relations with Pope’s Catholic church

Beginning at his arrival in eastern Santiago de Cuba on Monday, Benedict sprinkled his speeches with thinly-veiled references to Cuban dissidents, political prisoners, Cuban exiles and the need for the Caribbean island to push ahead with its economic reforms.

The pontiff rode in his Popemobile on the way to the airport and was bid farewell by streets lined with Cubans waving flags and cheering him.

President Raul Castro, who attended the pope’s Masses in Santiago on Monday and in Havana on Wednesday, saw off the pontiff, who is frail and moves slowly, before he boarded his jet for Rome and flew into stormy skies.

The two men clasped hands and Raul Castro dipped his head briefly in a show of reverence that he had made at their other meetings. Both he and his older brother were educated by Jesuits, the worldwide Catholic order.

“Your visit has taken place in an atmosphere of mutual understanding,” President Castro said. “Your holiness, we have found many and deep agreements, although it’s natural that we don’t think the same on all issues.”

Under 49 years of rule by Fidel Castro, the Roman Catholic Church lost its schools, hospitals, access to media and its prominent role in Cuban society.

But Raul Castro, who succeeded his ailing brother four years ago, has improved relations with the Church and is using it as interlocutor on issues such as political prisoners and dissidents as he undertakes potentially disruptive reforms to the country’s struggling Soviet-style economy.

He is encouraging more private enterprise to offset plans to cut 1 million jobs from government payrolls, which is 20 percent of the country’s labor force of 5.2 million.

But while Pope Benedict is urging Cuba to make deeper changes, the Cuban government sees its reforms as a way of strengthening communist rule, not weakening it.

The pope mentioned several times during his visit that he was happy relations had improved, but also said they needed to get better so the Church could help buffer against “trauma” or social upheaval.

“This must continue forwards, and I wish to encourage the country’s government authorities to strengthen what has already been achieved and advance along this path,” the aging Pope stated.

The Catholic Church, he added, “seeks to give witness by her preaching and teaching, both in catechesis and in schools and universities.”

Pope in Cuba : Search for truth needs the exercise of authentic freedom

In a possible dig at Marxism on Wednesday, Benedict said in his Mass that some “wrongly interpret this search for the truth, leading them to irrationality and fanaticism; they close themselves in ‘their truth,’ and try to impose it on others.”

He said the said the search for truth “always supposes the exercise of authentic freedom.”

The Church wants to get back some of the ground it lost after the revolution, so the pope urged the government to let it do more social work and play a bigger role in education.

Marino Murillo, a vice president in the Council of Ministers and the country’s economic reforms czar, made it clear that change to Cuba’s one-party political system is not in the works.

“In Cuba there won’t be political reform,” he stated at a news conference. “We are talking about the update of the Cuban economic model to make our socialism sustainable.”

During the farewell ceremony at the Jose Marti International Airport in Havana, the statesman said the meeting with the Cubans gave the Supreme Pontiff Pope Benedict the possibility to learn better and give justice of Cuba’s purposes.

Cuba : Farewell to Pope : Both sides are wiser

Cuba’s objective had been the dignity of man and human being, and we are aware that it does not only build on material basis, but also on spiritual values such as solidarity, mutual respect, honesty and truth- allegiance, Raul Castro said.

The Cuban president noted that to do common right was a principle Cuba learnt from priest Felix Varela, to whom the Pope recalled in Havana public mass, while Cuba inherited from Cuban national hero Jose Marti the wish to conquer justice.

‘ We confer supreme importance to family, grant a privilege to the role of parents in their children’s education, take care of childhood, and encourage youth without any paternalism,’ Raul Castro hinted this referring to the values Cuba has always defended.

Alluding the U.S. blockade on Cuba, Raul Castro criticized the “restrictive economic measures imposed from abroad,” which “negatively carry weigh on the population, what Pope backed up during his visit to beautiful Cuba.

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