Cuba’s Communist government, the priest said, took over the convent, cloister, and school of Los Escolapios after the revolution of 1959, expelling the nuns and setting up a guard post—one part of the regime’s sprawling apparatus of surveillance and control. The church downstairs was virtually closed, the congregation mostly exiled or jailed in accordance with Communist Cuba’s atheist principles.
The guards are gone now, along with the portraits of Fidel Castro and the secular schoolteachers who commandeered the convent’s lower floors after the revolution. The church is in the process of reclaiming the magnificent 18th-century cloister from the state, which left it in ruins. The priest, Iván Guerra Álvarez, made clear he believes that history is approaching another turning point, and that the Communist regime will soon be gone. “The Church will play a big role in the transition,” he told me. “We are the biggest institution in Cuba outside the government.”