Worshippers keep the faith in Cuba
Evangelical churches are booming after decades of repressive policies
Fidel Castro’s government sent the Rev. Juan Francisco Naranjo to two years of 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.”
Trump administration officials 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 administration has never 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.
An Associated Press examination 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.
However, 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.
“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 some 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.
Naranjo was part of that opening. After the work camp, he 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 with Castro to push for greater freedom.
The thaw 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 the issue of church construction.
The 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. The group says it based that information on a source inside Cuba whom it would not name.
Juan Whitaker, the Assemblies of God’s treasurer in Cuba, told The Associated Press this month none of its churches had been declared illegal or were at risk of confiscation.