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CNN Newsroom With Fredricka Whitfield-20150919-16:25:00

cuba for washington, d.c. let's dig deeper into the pope's visit. we have cnn correspondent, patrick ottoman. he is live in havana. it's estimated that more than half of cuba's 11 million people are catholic. what does this visit mean to them, do you think? >> reporter: it means a great deal. this will be the first spanish-speaking pope to come here. a pope that's played a key role in u.s.-cuban relations, the thawing in those relations. and we expect the pope to be landing in about three hours or so. so there is a lot of excitement. and of course, this pope has several very specific messages he wants to deliver. and one of those key messages is reconciliation. bringing the the divided cuban community here and the united states back together. and for one american priest working in cuba, that reconciliation has already happened. father gilbert walker celebrates mass in havana, speaking fluent spanish with only a slight

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CNN Newsroom With Fredricka Whitfield-20150919-16:26:00

accent of his native mississippi. walker is one of three american catholic priests in cuba, he says. it was his lifelong dream to move to the island where his great-grandparents lived for 30 years before leaving in the 1950s. >> i felt at home. i felt very much at home, surprisingly, to me. >> reporter: even more surprising, when he visited the town where his great-grandfather oversaw a sugar cane production was a discovery that he had deeper ties to the island. >> it was a strong intuition, only explanation was that god gave me this intuition that i had family here. that looks like it might have been their home. >> reporter: walker asked townspeople if his great-grandfather had children outside his marriage. the answer was yes. a daughter with a cuban woman. and soon after, he was introduced to her son, his cousin, raphael. >> i didn't know what to expect. i didn't know what he would be

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