Evangelical worship booming in Cuba
Congregations grow, but law silent on church construction
HAVANA, CUBA — Fidel Castro’s government sent the Rev. Juan Francisco Naranjo to a work camp in the 1960s for preaching the Gospel in a Cuba where atheism was law and the faithful were viewed as suspect. For years, Naranjo’s church was almost abandoned, with just a handful of people daring to attend services.
Naranjo died in 2000, but on a recent Sunday, his William Carey Baptist Church was packed and noisy. Government doctors treated disabled children at a clinic inside. A Bible study group discussed scripture in one corner of the building before a service attended by 200 of the faithful.
“In the 1960s, the few brothers and sisters who came here had to hide their Bibles in brown-paper covers,” said Esther Zulueta, a 57-year-old doctor. “It’s night and day.”
Officials in U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration have repeatedly said religious freedom is one of the key demands they will make of Cuba when they finish reviewing former president Barack Obama’s opening with the island. The U.S. administration has not been more specific, but outside groups have accused Cuba of systematically repressing the island’s growing ranks of evangelicals and other Protestants with acts including the seizure of hundreds of churches across the island, followed by the demolition of many.
The Associated Press has found a more complicated picture. Pastors and worshippers say Cuba is in the middle of a boom in evangelical worship, with tens of thousands of Cubans worshipping unmolested across the island each week.
While the government now recognizes freedom of religion, it doesn’t grant the right to build churches or other religious structures. It has demolished a handful of churches in recent years, but allowed their members to continue meeting in makeshift home sanctuaries. Like the Roman Catholic Church, the island’s dominant denomination, evangelical churches have begun providing social services once monopolized by the Communist government.
“There’s a revival of these churches, of the most diverse denominations in the country, and all of them are growing, not just in the number of members, but in their capacity to lead and act in society,” said Presbyterian pastor Joel Ortega Dopica, president of Council of Churches of Cuba, an officially recognized association of 32 Protestant denominations. “There is religious freedom in Cuba.”
Clergy and academics say Cuba’s 11 million people include 40,000 Methodists, 100,000 Baptists and 120,000 members of the Assemblies of God, which had roughly 10,000 members in the early 1990s, when Cuba began easing restrictions on public expressions of religious faith. The church council estimates there are about 25,000 evangelical and other Protestant houses of worship across the country. About 60 per cent of the population is baptized Catholic, with many also following Afro-Cuban syncretic traditions such as Santeria.
After the work camp, Naranjo returned to a church whose worshippers were barred from many state jobs. A thaw began in 1984, when visiting American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson stunned Cuba by taking Fidel Castro to a Protestant church service. In 1990, Naranjo was among a group of pastors who met Castro to push for a greater freedom, and his own church worked on building ties between religious groups and the Communist Party. The opening culminated in the 1998 visit of Pope John Paul II, which led to new liberties for both Catholic and Protestant worshippers.
The Cuban constitution now recognizes freedom of religion, but the law is silent on church construction. In a system in which the government has long monopolized public life, virtually all activities are presumed illegal unless the law says otherwise. Authorities in some areas have prohibited new churches, even as they allow worship in religious buildings erected before Cuba’s 1959 revolution.
London-based advocacy group Christian Solidarity Worldwide issued a report alleging the Cuban government committed 2,380 violations of religious liberty in 2016, most linked to the declaration of 2,000 Assemblies of God churches as illegal, with 1,400 in process of confiscation.
Juan Whitaker, the Assemblies of God’s treasurer in Cuba, said none of its churches had been declared illegal or were at risk of confiscation.
David Ellis, regional director for Latin America and Caribbean for world missions of the Missouribased General Council of the Assemblies of God: “We are in ongoing contact with the Cuba Assemblies of God leadership and they have not reported any churches being confiscated. Neither have they reported that churches have been threatened with confiscation.”
Kiri Kankhwende, a spokeswoman for Christian Solidarity Worldwide, said its assessment had not changed and any statement to the contrary could be explained by official pressure on churches in Cuba.
Christian Solidarity has also cited the case of Juan Carlos Nunez, a minister in the Apostolic Movement in the city of Las Tunas, while other religious freedom advocates have cited the case of Bernardo de Quesada, in Camaguey, as examples of religious persecution. Both men said churches they built in the yards of their homes were demolished by the government because they were constructed without permits. Both continue leading services inside their homes, where hundreds of worshippers gather each week.
“They tolerate me, but they don’t accept me,” said de Quesada. “I’m not shutting up or leaving.”