Alive and well
Evangelical churches are flourishing in Cuba
HAVANA—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.
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. And like the Roman Catholic Church, the island’s dominant The Associated 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 some 40,000 Methodists, 100,000 Baptists and 120,000 members of the Assemblies of God.