Two years before Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in 1998, then-Defense Minister Raúl Castro cracked down on a half-dozen young academics who had dared propose market reforms for the island’s Soviet-styled economy.

The Center for the Study of the Americas was ordered to stop studying Cuban issues. One of the academics suffered a fatal heart attack, blamed on the government pressures. Another fled into exile, and two others now live mostly abroad.

Today, it is President Raúl Castro who is championing even more daring reforms, including deep cuts in state spending and the largest expansion of private economic activity allowed in the communist-ruled island.

When Pope Benedict XVI lands in Santiago next month to start a three-day visit to the island, he will find a Cuba very different yet in many ways very similar, to what his predecessor encountered during his visit 14 years ago.

A different Castro is in charge. Church-state relations are warmer. Talk of economic reforms is now acceptable. Dissidents are more combative. But the economy is still in deep trouble. And a Castro is still in power.

Back in 1998, Cuba was “a living memory of the Soviet model of society,” yet the island’s Catholic Church had managed to endure and “give witness and provide hope against hope,” said Orlando Marquez, spokesman for the archdiocese of Havana.

Cuba was officially atheist from 1962 to 1992, Christmas was restored as an official holiday only in 1997. And the next year Cardinal Jaime Ortega became the first church leader to speak on state-owned television since the early 1960s.

Today, the church has “a more defined place in society,” there’s a church-state dialogue and Cuba “is living a process of transformations and reforms,” Marquez told El Nuevo Herald. “That’s the Cuba that Benedict wants to meet when he comes.”

After Ortega met with Castro in 2009, the cardinal announced the government would free more than 100 political prisoners and pro-government mobs in Havana halted their harassments of the dissident Ladies in White.

The church also has been permitted to build a new seminary, launch a business school in conjunction with a Catholic University in Spain and run a string of independent charity and educational programs that fill gaps in the government’s eroding social security net.

Yet critics say that the improved church-state relations came at the price of silence on government human rights abuses. All but 12 of the jailed dissidents were taken directly from prison to airplanes that flew them to exile in Spain, they noted.

“The church is now the only independent actor recognized by the government as an ally. Today, there is a quasi-concordat [an official agreement] that was not there before,” said Haroldo Dilla, one of the Center for the Study of the Americas academics attacked by Raúl Castro in 1996.

When the Polish-born John Paul visited Cuba Jan. 21-25 of 1998, he was a fierce opponent of communism and a healthy Fidel Castro had just addressed a Cuban Communist Party congress from a stage under large portraits of Marx and Lenin.

John Paul died in 2005 and Fidel Castro, now 85 years old, surrendered power the following year after emergency surgery. And when brother and successor Raúl Castro addressed another party congress last year, there were no portraits at all on the stage.