POWER OF PEACE; WORLD WAITS TO SEE IF POPE SPARKS FIRE IN CUBAN PEOPLE.

Byline: Steve Kloehn Chicago Tribune 

Pope John Paul II, whose simplest words and gestures helped touch off revolutions that changed the course of the 20th century, offers a once-unimaginable image to Cubans awaiting his historic visit.

``The moment for me to kiss your land draws near,'' the pontiff told the island's Roman Catholics in a Christmas message.

When the pope's plane lands in Havana on Wednesday afternoon, the world will watch as the pontiff slowly lowers his body to the ground to touch his lips to the tarmac. The symbolic act is a blessing from pastor to people, a humble ritual that John Paul II has used to greet the faithful in 80 journeys abroad over the last 19 years.

But coming from this pope, who has spent a lifetime pitting his faith against repressive governments, a kiss can be much more than a kiss. From Poland to Chile to the Philippines, John Paul II's arrival has given people the energy and courage to demand freedom, not by attacking political leaders head-on, but by appealing to a higher power.

This week, as he travels to one of the last outposts of communism in the world, the 77-year-old pontiff once again finds himself arriving at a moment when the futures of a local church and an atheistic regime may be shaped in part by his words, and how they are received by people who seem ripe for inspiration.

``He's enacting a drama that has universal significance,'' said Michael Novak, a scholar of Catholicism at the American Enterprise Institute. ``It's an immense thing when a pope shows up in front of a totalitarian and secular power and speaks for liberty.''

There is a trade-off embedded in the pope's dramatic decision to visit Cuba: Communist strongman Fidel Castro, in desperate need of friends after the fall of the Soviet empire, can spend four days basking in the publicity and legitimacy that surround the leader of 900 million Roman Catholics worldwide.

In return, the pope can extract promises from Castro that he will ease restrictions on the church in Cuba. And the pontiff will have an opportunity to preach human dignity to a people long conditioned to life only as part of the collective, in full view of a regime assailed for its violations of human rights.

Even before the pope's visit begins, both parties have achieved some of their specific goals. Castro has allowed new priests to enter the country and permitted outdoor religious ceremonies, both of which he had prevented for years. He made Christmas a national holiday for the first time in decades.

Last week, he unexpectedly permitted the Catholic Church's ranking official in Cuba, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, to speak on state-run television for the first time.

In turn, Castro had the satisfaction of watching Ortega remind viewers that the pope opposes the American economic embargo against Cuba - a theme that most pope-watchers believe John Paul himself will raise during his visit.

But this is no ordinary bargain. For if the pontiff's kiss seals an unspoken deal between the institutions of church and state, it may also touch off something far less predictable among the millions of people who are watching him.

For many observers, an obvious though imperfect parallel can be found in the pope's visits to his homeland, Poland, in 1979 and 1983.

Like Cuba, Poland in those years was a historically Catholic country under the thumb of a communist regime, albeit a land with a stronger tradition of fierce faith than the Caribbean island. As in Cuba, the pope came in hopes not of revolution, but of loosening the government's chokehold on the church.

For years, scholars and journalists have bickered among themselves about how much the communist leadership, Western powers and independent social movements contributed to the rise of Poland's Solidarity labor movement and the collapse of communism across the former Soviet bloc.

But on one point they sound nearly unanimous: The outcome would have been longer and bloodier without the pope's deft ability to maintain the push for freedom on track while keeping the government placated.

Occasionally, John Paul would call directly on the Polish government to respect the rights of the church and the rights of the people. More often, as in his other trips around the world - and as most observers expect him to do in Cuba - he addressed religious themes such as natural rights, human dignity and the sanctity of suffering, which took on added significance because of the surrounding political climate, almost like a code to his listeners.

``I believe he was absolutely central to (the fall of communism) . . . central to why it happened in the 1980s and why it happened nonviolently,'' said George Weigel, a Catholic theologian who is writing a biography of the pope.

In addition to hundreds of hours of interviews with other church officials, Weigel has been given more than 25 hours of interviews with John Paul, an unusual level of access, especially in the later years of the pontificate.

The pope, according to Weigel, considers his own role in Poland as ``a spark in a tinderbox,'' lighting the intellectual fire that kept Solidarity alive through years of brutal suppression.

``It would be a grave mistake to view Cuba through the prism of Poland,'' Weigel said. ``First of all, the pope is a Pole, not a Cuban.''

And Cuba is a Latin American island, not a long-besieged country in the heart of Eastern Europe. The church in Poland encompassed 80 percent to 90 percent of the population. Catholic authorities in Cuba say 70 percent of Cuba's 11 million people should be considered Catholic, but independent estimates say only 40 percent were baptized, and 10 percent attend Mass. Moreover, Santeria, a fusion of African faiths and Catholicism, claims millions of followers, even among baptized Catholics.

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PHOTO (Color) Young Zoila Azcuy changes a sign Friday outside a Havana church counting the days until the arrival of Pope John Paul II in Cuba. The pontiff will be in Havana on Wednesday.

Associated Press