wfn.org | Cuba's Other Christians: Island's Protestant Population Is Climbing

[PCUSA.NEWS@pcusa.org]

22-January-1998 
98024 
 
    Cuba's Other Christians: 
    Island's Protestant Population Is Climbing 
 
    by Ira Rifkin 
    Religion News Service 
 
WASHINGTON-Lois Kroehler can remember what it was like for Protestants in 
Cuba in the late 1950s: Roman Catholics would cross the street rather than 
walk past the Presbyterian-affiliated school she ran in Cardenas, about 90 
miles east of Havana. 
 
          "The local Catholic priest taught that Protestants were the devil 
and that the people should not send their children to our school," said 
Kroehler, an American who has spent more than 40 years in Cuba as a 
Presbyterian missionary. 
 
          Protestants were a distinct minority in overwhelmingly Catholic 
pre-Castro Cuba when Kroehler, fresh out of the University of Nebraska, 
followed her religious inclinations and moved to the Caribbean island 
nation, where she has lived ever since. 
 
          It's a different story today. 
 
          The Cuba Pope John Paul II will visit for five days beginning 
Jan. 21 is now the Western Hemisphere's only Spanish-speaking nation in 
which the number of practicing Protestants comes close to equaling the 
number of practicing Catholics. 
 
          Moreover, Cuba's Protestant churches are growing at a faster rate 
than the island's Catholic Church, which suffers from an acute shortage of 
priests and bore the brunt of Fidel Castro's past antireligion policies. 
 
          "We're not talking about Mexico or Peru here," said Mario Antonio 
Ramos, a Cuban-born Southern Baptist pastor who now lives in Miami. "Cuba 
has lots of American influences and a tradition of religious diversity that 
has proved fertile for Protestant evangelism." 
 
          Like its Latin American neighbors, Cuba has a long history of 
Catholic religious association, dating from the 16th-century arrival of 
Spanish colonizers. And despite almost four decades of Cuban Marxism and, 
at times, severe persecution, the Cuban Catholic Church remains the 
nation's largest single entity not under government control. 
 
          But institutional breadth aside, the Catholic Church's religious 
hold over Cubans is limited. While about 40 percent of Cuba's 11 million 
people are baptized Catholics, only about 400,000 attend services at the 
island's 650 Catholic churches and 200 "casas de misi¢n," or prayer houses. 
 
          Moreover, many of those baptized as Catholics are closer to the 
Afro-Cuban folk religion Santer¡a than they are the church. 
 
          "For many Santer¡a followers, Catholic baptism is a requirement. 
But that doesn't really make them Catholic," said Andres Perez y Mena, an 
expert on Afro-Cuban religion who teaches at Long Island University in 
Brooklyn, N.Y. 
 
          Santer¡a - "the way of the saints" in Spanish -  combines the 
worship of traditional African deities with the adoration of Catholic 
saints. The deities were given saints' names by Cuba's slave population to 
fool their Spanish colonial masters, who imposed Catholic conversion on 
them. 
 
          As many as 3 million Cubans are involved in Santer¡a, according 
to some estimates. Santer¡a, which is home-centered and has no 
institutional structure, involves ritual animal sacrifice - usually using 
chickens or goats - and physical and psychological healing ceremonies. 
 
          Meanwhile, more than 300,000 Cubans belong to the nation's 54 
Protestant denominations, who operate some 1,666 churches and hundreds of 
home-based congregations, said the Rev. Pablo Oden Marichal, an Episcopal 
priest and national coordinator of the Cuban Council of Churches. More than 
700 of the churches have been established since 1992, when the Cuban 
government jettisoned its official "atheist" status and relabeled the 
nation "secular." 
 
          "The evangelical churches (as Protestant churches are generally 
referred to in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America) are growing very 
rapidly, much faster than the Catholic Church," Marichal said. 
 
          "While the Catholics are concentrated in the cities, evangelical 
churches are everywhere in Cuba. Even in remote mountain areas. So people 
looking for religion see us where they do not see Catholic priests or 
churches." 
 
          Cuba's Protestant churches also command a higher degree of 
theological loyalty than does the Cuban Catholic Church. The influence on 
them of Santer¡a and other Afro-Cuban religious beliefs is much less 
obvious. 
 
          "The Protestants in Cuba are very Protestant, just like they are 
in Georgia or Alabama," said Ramos, who is also acting dean of Miami's 
South Florida Center for Theological Studies. 
 
          Protestantism arrived in Cuba during the mid-18th century, 
brought there by American missionaries and later by returning Cuban 
political exiles who plotted the end of Spanish rule from safe havens in 
the United States. 
 
          Today, Cuba's Protestant leadership is largely homegrown, with 
virtually all pastors being Cuban. That's in contrast to the Cuban Catholic 
Church, more than half of whose about 290 priests are foreign born. 
 
          Cuba's Protestant leaders - under the aegis of the Cuban Council 
of Churches - will meet with the pope during his upcoming visit. The 
session is scheduled for the morning of Jan. 25, just prior to what 
promises to be the best-attended Mass of the papal visit. That Mass is set 
for Havana's Revolution Square on the pope's last day in Cuba. 
 
          Baptists - about 70,000 strong - constitute the largest 
Protestant grouping in Cuba.  Seventh-day Adventists, Methodists, 
Presbyterians and Episcopalians are among the larger Protestant groups. 
 
          Pentecostal groups, such as the Assemblies of God, and 
charismatic movements within the mainline denominations are a mainstay of 
Cuban Protestantism today. 
 
          "Cuban culture is Caribbean," said Harvard Divinity School 
professor Harvey Cox. "It's emotional and has a strong African component 
imported by the slaves.  Pentecostal faith is experiential, communitarian, 
healing and body-involving. It fits right in with the Caribbean character." 
 
          Both Catholic and Protestant leaders in Cuba talk today of the 
nation's new interest in religion as an alternative to Cuba's faltering 
Marxist ideology and the despair over the poverty gripping the island. 
 
          But observers of the Cuban religious scene say the ranks of the 
nation's Protestant churches also have grown since the 1959 revolution that 
established Castro's rule simply because, like the revolution, they, too, 
presented an alternative to a discredited Catholic Church. 
 
          While the Protestant churches were also persecuted during the 
early years of Castro's rule, they faced fewer adversities than did the 
Catholic Church, which was heavily identified with the deposed government 
of Fulgencio Batista and actively opposed Castro's attempts to nationalize 
the private sector. 
 
          "The church set itself up against the government out of fear of 
communism," said Anthony Stevens-Arroyo, president of the Program for the 
Analysis of Religion Among Latinos (PARAL) at the City University of New 
York.  "It overestimated its power and paid a price." 
 
          Much of the Catholic Church's base of support - upper- and 
middle-class white Cubans - were among the first Cubans to flee the island 
for the United States and elsewhere. 
 
          Protestants, on the other hand, "were more sympathetic with the 
revolution because they were never in power," explained the Rev. Oscar 
Boliolo, Latin America and Caribbean director for the New York-based 
National Council of Churches. 
 
          "With the revolution, Protestants felt they gained a voice in 
Cuban society, as limited as it may be." 
 
          Perez y Mena said Cuban Protestants remain closer to the Castro 
government than practicing Catholics and more likely to "participate in the 
search for Christian-based socialism" in Cuba. 
 
          "Their activism is what's keeping some social projects alive," he 
said. 
 
          The government has rewarded the Protestant churches by allowing 
the Cuban Council of Churches to broadcast on state radio at Christmas and 
Easter.  Catholics have been denied that privilege, although Havana 
Cardinal Jaime Ortega was allowed to make an unprecedented appearance Jan 
13. on state television, a concession made as part of the papal visit. 

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