Are Pope Leo's ancestors from Cuba? Genealogy researchers in Miami think so
It has become an old joke in the Cuban-American community to note that Cubans seem to be everywhere. And so, when Pope Leo was elected to lead the Catholic Church and traces of his rich heritage began to emerge, including an ancestor who had been born in Havana, a Cuban genealogist in Miami rushed to figure out if this was just an isolated case or, if, by any chance, the first American Pope had Cuban roots.
As it happened, the pope has several generations of Cuban ancestors.
Robert Francis Prevost, the American cardinal who became Leo XIV after Pope Francis' death in April, was born in Chicago to a father with Italian and French ancestors and a mother with French, Canadian and Black heritage. But there was much more. The Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami tracked several generations of Cuban ancestors on his mother's side, dating back to the 17th Century, who themselves descended from Spanish and Italian families.
In total, five generations in the pope's family tree on his mother's side were connected to Cuba, starting with Diego de Arana Isla, a Spanish captain who settled in Havana as an accountant for the Spanish Crown, and Juan Gonzalez Vazquez, a settler who farmed animals on land he owned in Pinar del Río in western Cuba. A century later, one of their descendants, Manuel José Ramos y Bastos, born in Havana in 1755, would travel to the United States and marry María Catalina Guesnon, a woman from New Orleans. He is one of the great-grandfathers of the pope's great-grandmother, Marie Rosa Pantaleón Ramos.
The findings were first published by Mirelis Peraza, one of the Genealogy Club's directors, who said she was immediately curious when she learned about Ramón y Bastos' existence from another researcher who had traced the pope's roots in New Orleans.
'I was surprised, I didn't think I'd ever heard that there would be a pope with Cuban roots, and I made a mental note,' Peraza said. Then she found one of the surnames already linked to the pope in sources she was consulting to establish her family's own genealogy. From there, things went fast.
Lourdes del Pino, the club's first vice president, picked up where Peraza left off and found Diego de Arana Isla's Spanish ancestors in the 1500s, 15 generations back in the pope's family tree. She also identified the Italian ancestors of Diego's Spanish wife, Ana Tadino, who lived in the Duchy of Milan, now part of Italy, at the time under Spanish rule.
Their findings were reflected in the fascinating pope's family tree recently published in The New York Times. The Club, which has collaborated in the past with PBS's show 'Finding Your Roots,' once again partnered with Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for the Times story.
The pope's family tree 'is the perfect representation of the Americas,' said Del Pino. 'What fascinates us and we are delighted with is the diversity that the pope's genealogy has shown. An impressive diversity that the vast majority of Hispanics carry.'
Del Pino said she had been surprised at how much ancient relatives traveled around the world.
'Spending two months on a ship? I'd go crazy, but for them, it was part of their lives,' she said. 'Once you start researching, you realize people in those times moved around much more than we thought.'
Overcoming challenges
Researching Cuban genealogy presents particular challenges, given the limited availability of digitized sources and Cuban government restrictions on accessing archives. But Peraza had a stroke of luck when she found out many of the records she was looking for were in one of the few early historical sources still available: a rare book of marriages that took place in the late 1600s and early 1700s at the Iglesia del Espírito Santo (Church of the Holy Spirit), Havana's second Catholic church.
'One of the things we have against us is that many of those books have been damaged over time; they are no longer available,' Peraza said. 'We were lucky that the pope's ancestors we found were all concentrated in the same area, that of the Church of the Holy Spirit, and coincidentally, almost everything fell into the same book, which luckily still survives.'
The researchers' good fortune continued. Because Diego de Arana Isla wanted to become a knight of the Order of Santiago, a highly prestigious and selective appointment at the time, he underwent a thorough background check that was documented and is available in digital archives from Spain, making it easier for Del Pino to locate his ancestors.
Diego became, in fact, a knight of the Order of Santiago in 1678. 'His service record and list of merits depict 40 years of devout service to the crown with multiple military and administrative posts throughout the colonies,' Peraza wrote. He died in Cuba in 1684.
Incidentally, Diego's sister Catalina, whose children were born in Venezuela, would become the great-great-grandmother of Antonio José de Sucre, one of Latin America's independence leaders.
The Aranas came from Isla, a small village in Cantabria in northern Spain. Diego's father, Diego de Arana Valladar, was born in 1595 and lived an adventurous life as the captain of a galleon in the Spanish Royal Navy, defending Portuguese settlements in the Caribbean and South America from Dutch corsairs, said Marial Iglesias, a Cuban historian and Harvard University researcher who collaborated on the Times story. (Portugal and Spain were united for about 60 years until 1640.)
A final mystery
As the surnames of the ancestors began to pop up, Iglesias realized that there is a chance the pope's Cuban ancestors might be connected to one of the most iconic places in Havana: La Plaza de la Revolución, or Revolution Square, where Pope Jean Paul II and Pope Francis had held mass during historic trips to the island.
The landmark, topped with a massive obelisk and a statue of José Martí, Cuba's independence hero and most famous writer, was built under Fulgencio Batista's government in the 1950s as the 'Civic Plaza' in an elevation known as the Catalans' Hill. But in the past, that spot had a curious name: Loma de Tadino, or Tadino's Hill.
'I haven't had time to find out why it's called Loma de Tadino, but that's a very rare surname. The family lived in Cuba for generations, and it could have been their property,' Iglesias said. 'Imagine if the pope's Italian branch of the family, who moved to Cuba in the 1600s, gave name to the place where the statue of José Martí stands. How about that?'
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