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Pope Benedict XVI has prayed before the nation's patron saint for freedom and renewal "for the greater good of all Cubans", but the island's communist leaders quickly rejected the Roman Catholic leader's appeal for political change after five decades of one-party rule.

The exchange came hours before Fidel Castro confirmed he would happily meet with the pontiff before he leaves for Rome on Wednesday. Castro made the much-awaited announcement at the end of a short opinion piece posted on a government website on Tuesday, saying he had decided to ask for "a few minutes of [the pope's] busy time".

Expectations of a meeting have dominated the pope's three-day visit to Cuba, which culminates with a morning mass in Havana's Revolution Plaza.

On Tuesday, he had a 55-minute closed-door meeting with President Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, in which the pontiff proposed that Good Friday be made a holiday.

There was no immediate response. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev Federico Lombardi, said it was natural for the government to take time to consider such a request, which followed on from the Cuban government's decision to declare Christmas a national holiday after Pope John Paul II's 1998 visit.

"It's not that it changes reality in a revolutionary way, but it can be a sign of a positive step as was the case of Christmas after John Paul's visit," Lombardi said.

Asked if the pope raised the matter of political prisoners or Alan Gross, a US government subcontractor sentenced to 15 years in prison in Cuba on spy charges, Lombardi said "requests of a humanitarian nature" came up but he had no information about whether individual cases were discussed.

Benedict spent nearly twice as long with Castro as he normally does with heads of state, which Lombardi attributed to the pontiff's desire to get to know the president.

Days after dismissing the Marxist ideology on which the Cuban system is based, the pope continued to gently press themes highly sensitive to the Cuban government in his prayer and short speech at the sanctuary of the Virgin of Charity of Cobre near the eastern city of Santiago.

"I have entrusted to the Mother of God the future of your country, advancing along the ways of renewal and hope, for the greater good of all Cubans," he said. "I have also prayed to the Virgin for the needs of those who suffer, of those who are deprived of freedom, those who are separated from their loved ones or who are undergoing times of difficulty."

Marino Murillo, Cuba's economic tsar and a vice-president, responded: "In Cuba there will not be political reform."

The pope has kept his language lofty, his criticism vague and open to interpretation, but Murillo's comments left no room for doubt and were quickly picked up by pro-government bloggers and on Twitter.

Raul Castro has said opening up Cuba's political system would inevitably spell doom for its socialist project since any alternative party would be dominated by enemies across the Florida straits and beyond.

During a quiet moment at the shrine of the Virgin of Charity, Benedict prayed for more Cubans to embrace the faith in a country that is the least Catholic in Latin America. While most Cubans are nominally Catholic, fewer than 10% practise the faith.

He called on all Cubans "to work for justice, to be servants of charity and to persevere in the midst of trials".

The pope pointedly referred to the Virgin by her popular name, La Mambisa, in a gesture to the many non-Catholics on the island who nonetheless venerate the statue as an Afro-Cuban deity. Mambisa is the word for the Cuban fighters who won independence from Spain at the turn of the last century.

Dunia Felipillo, 45, said she was proud to see the pope praying before the Virgin of Charity, even though she herself was not Catholic. "We all ask favours of La Cachita," she said, using the Cuban slang for the Virgin, as she watched the ceremony on TV from the lobby of a Santiago hotel.

Meanwhile, dissidents on the island say they still haven't identified the man who yelled "Down with the Revolution! Down with the dictatorship!" before the pope's mass on Monday in Santiago. Security agents hustled him away. Video of the incident showed him being slapped by another man wearing the uniform of a first-aid worker before security agents separated them.

A Cuban exile group launched a flotilla of boats to park in international waters a little over 12 miles off Havana and set off fireworks to welcome the pope.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/28/pope-cuba-prays-renewal-hope