My interest in visiting the church and the Evangelical Seminary in Cuba goes back to contacts with Central American Christians beginning in the late 1980s. My then-congregation in Ottawa shared with others in the sponsorship of two families from El Salvador, whose robust faith and hope made me want to visit the places they came from and learn more about the sources of their spiritual strength, their culture and the political struggles they had faced. By 1993 an opportunity arose for me to go to Nicaragua. I served there until the end of 1996.
Seminary is a family affair in Cuba. Students relax between classes with their spouses and children.
Since returning to Canada, a good deal of my heart has remained in Latin America. My visit to Cuba in May and early June of 2001 was sponsored by International Ministries and St. David's Church, St. John's, Newfoundland. Rev. Hector Mendez invited me to stay in the dormitory at First Presbyterian-Reformed Church, Havana. In existence since 1890, the church is located in a once-prosperous district of the city. Walking around the district now, I was impressed by an inner-city decay intensified by a half-century of economic embargo imposed by the United States. Peso shops carry basic goods like rice, beans, cooking oil, eggs and meat sold up to the monthly rations the government allows for each Cuban. There are fewer street vendors than in other Latin American countries, but also fewer people begging, because the subsidized monthly rations provide basic survival.
A robust congregation participates in worship.
The old Capitol building, built in the 1920s, marks the transition from Centro Havana to Old Havana. On billboards and embankments are the slogans of the revolution and the image of Che Guevara. Much of the Old City is undergoing impressive restoration, and classic hotels of a former era are being restored to enhance tourism. I wondered what ordinary people who live nearby thought of this effort while their homes continue to crumble.
Mendez' ministry has been recognized as being on the "cutting edge of mission" by the Presbyterian Church's E.H. Johnson Award. The church ministers in a multitude of ways. Supported by links with YMCAs in Atlantic Canada, the Asociación de Jóvenes Christiana (ACJ) offers Christian service to the community, including a telephone help-line staffed by psychologists, relaxation and seniors programs and programs for over 1,000 children in the Havana area. This is the only Y which has ever functioned in a communist country. The government tolerates it as a ministry of the church. It operates under the umbrella of the Cuban Council of Churches. The church is also the centre for the publication of a weekly bulletin of ecumenical news, which is mailed across the country.
There are Bible study and prayer cells during the week across the city, and the church also operates a library and study centre for Christian literature. On Sunday morning there is church school for all ages, as well as adult classes. The worship service includes an extensive period of congregational participation in the form of testimonies, as well as the traditional elements of scripture, pastoral prayer, hymns and preaching. On my last Sunday in Havana I had the privilege of witnessing a service for the reception of 49 new members by profession of Christian faith. The service bore witness to the tremendous growth of Protestant churches in Cuba, which have grown in membership by 50 per cent in the last six years.
The Dora E. Valentin Presbyterian Reformed Church in Varadero.
The Evangelical Seminary is located on a beautiful property overlooking the city of Matanzas. It serves students from Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian and other Protestant denominations. Many students live on campus with their families, forming a community of about 150. The many children running in and out of events like thesis defences were a reminder that Latin American culture is likely to include whole families in things we reserve for adults.
I was privileged to be at the Seminary at the time candidates for the licentiate (a professional degree more advanced than our bachelor's) were defending their theses. One student urged the church not to send reluctant graduates with an urban background into rural ministry without giving them orientation to the cultural differences in rural society and encouraging a commitment to longer term service. Another saw the recent church growth in Cuba as leading to the temptation to focus attention only on the Christian formation of new converts, to the detriment of the church's prophetic and diaconal ministry to the society as a whole. Another student looked at the impact on the church of the mass exodus of U.S. missionaries from Cuba after 1959, and the lay movement that sprang up to offer worship leadership, evangelism and caring to Cuban congregations suddenly bereft of their pastors. One of the most significant was presented by a Presbyterian student whose thesis was Ambassadors In Memory Of Christ. It considered the theological understanding of reconciliation in the history of the church. The final chapter asked how, when the time came, the church in Cuba could engage in a ministry of reconciliation between Cubans who remained on their island and Cubans who went into exile in the United States.
The Church in Cuba has suffered from great adversity over the last 42 years. When the Soviet Union was a major benefactor of the Cuban Revolution, Cuba was characterized by a militant official atheism. There were disincentives for those who persisted in being believers, and the churches were expected to gradually wither away. But when the Soviet system collapsed, the Cuban government re-evaluated its stance towards the churches and began initiatives with the evangelical churches to bring about a less hostile relationship between church and state. While many church people appreciate the practical gains of the revolution, there is no sign that Christians are idolizing the Marxist ideology or the revolution's heroes. Many chafe under the restrictions and controls of life in a communist state. But in the more relaxed atmosphere of the last decade, the church has enjoyed unprecedented growth; the fruit, I believe, of its faithfulness to the Gospel through the most difficult of times, and also of the thirst of Cubans for something more satisfying than dialectical materialism to sustain them spiritually.
