Pope Benedict XVI met yesterday with Cuban revolutionary icon Fidel Castro on the last day of his trip to bolster the Roman Catholic Church’s ties with Cuba’s Communist leaders.

Shortly after celebrating mass before 500,000 people in the heart of Havana, Pope Benedict met with the 85-year-old Castro for about 30 minutes, a Vatican spokesman said without giving details of their discussions.

The talk came as the Pontiff has been gently but persistently prodding Communist authorities to embrace change.

“Cuba and the world need change, but this will occur only if each one is in a position to seek the truth and chooses the way of love, sowing reconciliation and fraternity,” the pontiff told the crowd including President Raul Castro.

“The truth is a desire of the human person, the search for which always supposes the exercise of authentic freedom,” he said, as hundreds of nuns cheered and chanted, and others waved a sea of Vatican yellow and Cuban blue, white and red flags.

Hailing the Cuban government’s granting of freedom of religion since 1998, Pope Benedict, 84, said Cubans’ quests for truth generally should also respect “the inviolable dignity of the human person.”

His comment appeared to be an oblique reference to dissidents pressing for political opening in the Americas’ only one-party, Communist-ruled country. Dozens were rounded up and arrested during the Pope’s visit, dissident sources said.

Human rights groups such as the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation have had their phone lines cut since Monday. The mobile phones of prominent activists were also unreachable, Amnesty International said.

About a half million Cubans, on foot but also packed onto state buses and trucks, and decked out in Vatican flag-yellow visors had thronged the square where Fidel Castro famously gave countless addresses to masses of supporters beneath the Jose Marti monument.

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