You don’t have to be brought up Cuban or Catholic like me to understand that the current pope is a disgrace to the throne of St. Peter. His pro-Communist leanings are apparent, as is his hard left ideology in both ecclesiastical and temporal matters. Rachel Campos-Duffy, a very telegenic and sharp FNC personality, details Francis’ betrayal of the Cuban people.

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Campos-Duffy: If you spend time with Cuban and Venezuelan Catholics, you will hear about the pain inflicted on them by the man who is supposed to be their shepherd: Pope Francis. The heartache and betrayal felt by faithful Catholics, many of whom risked or continue to risk their livelihoods and their lives to practice and hold on to their faith and Christian traditions, is the reason so many freedom-loving Catholics have dubbed the Argentine pope, “Papa Che,” after the iconic communist murderer, Che Guevara.

It was more than a week after protests spontaneously erupted across the island of Cuba before “Papa Che” said a word about the courageous demonstrators. Following a brutal crackdown of these freedom protests, heartbreaking video and images emerged of teenagers being dragged from their home in front of their crying parents and faced with the impossibly cruel choice of joining the military to fight against their families and their own liberation or be sent to the gulags. While brave Cubans were being rounded up by the government’s merciless secret police, Pope Francis found time to make a statement about racism and the Soccer World Cup, but not a word about the human rights abuses in Cuba.

It was like a knife to the heart. It’s hardly lost on Cubans living on the prison-island, or the millions of Cubans in exile across the world, that Pope Francis isn’t exactly known for holding his tongue. He publicly weighs in on virtually every social justice issue under the sun, even those that challenge Church orthodoxy.

In spite of the incriminating evidence against Cuba’s communist regime, Pope Francis could only muster a half-hearted comment this week in his weekly Vatican address about being “close” to the Cuban people and a lame call for “peace and dialogue.” A statement that was woefully short of solidarity.

To further demoralize the Cuban people and hide the regime’s atrocities, the dictatorship shut down internet and cell phone coverage. Still, there was no word on that from the pope who renounced silk and traditionally ornate papal vestments in order to cast himself as the “defender” of the poor and downtrodden.

Cubans are right to wonder whether the pope cares more about plastics in the ocean than the bodies of thousands of desperate Cubans who die in those unforgiving waters seeking political, economic, and religious liberty.

How horrible must the conditions be and must the future look in communist Cuba for a mother to put herself and a newborn baby on a rickety raft, in shark infested waters with the hope and a prayer of reaching America’s shores?

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It should not be hard for a Catholic pontiff, particularly one so intent on signaling his solidarity with the poor, to condemn the rich rulers who created these conditions, as photos circulate on the internet of Cuba’s ruling class eating lobster. Even the OG Fidel Castro, ever the elitist, possessed 20 luxury properties on the island and had his Spanish Iberico ham (a delicacy achieved by restricting a pig’s diet to acorns) flown in from Spain while the Cuban people starved…

In 1917, the Bolsheviks took control of Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. That same year, Our Lady of Fatima appeared to three peasant children in the Portuguese countryside. During that apparition, which was officially recognized by the Catholic Church in 1930, the Virgin Mary implored the children to pray for Russia and her conversion. If not, she warned, Russia would “spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church”. At the time, the children could not have known what any of this meant, but today, and especially in Cuba, millions know exactly what the horrors of communism have wrought. So should Pope Francis, if only he would listen to his impoverished, persecuted and abandoned flock in Cuba.