HOLGUIN, Cuba (AP) – In this quiet city in eastern Cuba, families know how ideology can divide.
After Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, Olga Maria Saladrigas’ family decided they disagreed with the country’s new socialist system and fled to Miami. Her cousin Berta Luisa Fernandez’s father backed the revolution and decided they would stay. The two women grew up with only a handful of memories of each other.
As Pope Francis called on Cubans to overcome their differences at a Mass in Holguin on Monday, the cousins reunited for the third time in 50 years, a living example of the reconciliation that the pope has made a central theme of his trip to Cuba.
Saladrigas and her husband, Carlos, a Cuba-American businessman who has been one of the key backers of U.S.-Cuban detente, flew to Havana for the pope’s visit, then drove 14 hours to Holguin, arriving at 6:30 a.m.
Fernandez and Olga Maria Saladrigas screamed when they saw one another, kissing and hugging before Fernandez made her cousin a typical Cuban breakfast of coffee and toasted bread and butter.