The regime takes advantage of the mistake made by the fraternity in its attempt to dismiss the Grand Master
14ymedio, Juan Izquierdo, Havana, August 1, 2024 — The eyes of the Cuban Freemasons are on the meeting that the members of the fraternity in Havana, including several senior officials, will hold this Thursday with Caridad Diego, the Communist Party’s head of the Office of Religious Affairs. The agenda: mediating the institutional crisis that began in January with the theft of $19,000 from the office of Grand Master Mario Alberto Urquía Carreño, which now threatens to stoke the schism between the two highest Masonic authorities in the country, the Grand Lodge and the Supreme Council of Degree 33.
The mediation of Diego, the eternal apparatchik of the regime in this position, assumes that the Masonic problem is already in the hands of the Communist Party and not of the Ministry of Justice, whose Registry of Associations has failed to resolve the crisis through successive interventions. For the historian and exiled Mason Gustavo E. Pardo Valdés, the Party has a clear objective: to create the image that “the Office of Religious Affairs is conciliatory and is the savior of Masonic unity.”
According to Pardo, several of the Freemasons on the Island believe that the Party will take “advantage and benefit” from the exchange. In any case, he explains, the meeting – which will take place at the headquarters of the provincial government of Havana – will be “very interesting.” “The Freemasons of the capital have been ’invited’ to this meeting. There you will be able to know or intuit who is behind this chaos,” says Pardo.
Entrenched in his office and with the support of several senior officials who recognize his authority – including his secretary, Juliannis Reinaldo Galano – Urquía Carreño has continued to legislate and issue decrees against the lodges that oppose him. Last week, at least 200 Freemasons from several provinces asked the Grand Master to leave his office and face those who asked for his resignation peacefully. His answer came a few days later.
Four decrees, signed by Urquía Carreño and ratified by Galano, sanctioned two lodges that refused to accept his authority with a measure of suspension. The lodges are Evolution, in Artemisa, and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, General Guillermo Moncada and Luz, from Havana.
According to Pardo, Cuban Freemasonry has been shipwrecked for several months due to serious ethical and legal errors of its members, not only of the Grand Master. The four lodges that agreed to the non-recognition of Urquía Carreño acted, in the light of Masonic Legislation, illegally, whatever their intentions.
Pardo defended this opinion in an article published last Sunday, in which he reminded the Cuban Freemasons that they were bound by obedience to the person occupying the Grand Lodge. There were other legal remedies that should have been used to oust Urquía Carreño, and violating the Masonic Code, he emphasizes, only complicates the matter.
“Urquía Carreño is th