Caridad Diego Bello

Caridad Diego Bello has led the Cuban Communist Party's Office for Religious Affairs (Oficina de Atención a Asuntos Religiosos) since the early 2000s, making her the longest-serving interlocutor between the Cuban state and the country's religious institutions, principally the Catholic Church and the diverse Protestant and Afro-Cuban traditions. The office is the institutional channel through which state recognition, building permits, foreign-clergy travel and inter-faith dialogue are negotiated.

On Saturday 9 May 2026 she attended the Havana Cathedral thanksgiving mass marking the first anniversary of Pope Leo XIV's pontificate, alongside Vice President Salvador Valdés Mesa and Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla. Her presence at state level confirmed the Cuban government's continued investment in the Vatican channel, even as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio simultaneously held a 45-minute audience with Pope Leo XIV at the Holy See discussing humanitarian-aid routing through the Catholic Church rather than through GAESA.

Diego Bello has historically been the Cuban official most directly engaged with the Vatican Mediation track, including the 2015 Obama-Castro normalisation and the 13 March 2026 prisoner-release announcement that Amnesty International later found contained zero prisoners of conscience. Her institutional continuity gives Havana an operational counterpart for any Catholic-Church-mediated humanitarian channel; whether that translates into actual aid flows depends on Holy See and State Department actions yet to be publicly readout.