NEWS STORY: Cuban Communist Party Official Addresses Church Leaders

c. 2000 Religion News Service HAVANA _ In what church leaders view as a validation of their growing legitimacy, an official of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party addressed some 300 leaders of Cuban Churches of Christ gathered in Havana in early March. “This country also is … fighting … so that things […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

HAVANA _ In what church leaders view as a validation of their growing legitimacy, an official of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party addressed some 300 leaders of Cuban Churches of Christ gathered in Havana in early March.

“This country also is … fighting … so that things like Christianity can be preached from the heart, in good faith,” Mayda Gutierrez, a representative of the party’s Office of Attention to Religious Affairs, told the leaders.


The church leaders were assembled for the church’s second annual meeting of ministers.

While the Cuban government in recent years has been reaching out to the Roman Catholic Church and more liberal mainline Protestant denominations, the meeting with the Churches of Christ leaders was considered unique because of the denomination’s generally conservative theological and social outlook.

Echoing a watchword of the socialist regime’s 40-year attempt to radically transform Cuba, Gutierrez spoke of “the society of the new man” she sees as a “common destiny” for the state she represented and the believers she addressed.

Among several North American visitors at the meeting was David Heffington, a representative of Healing Hands International of Nashville, Tenn., a Church of Christ relief organization that has channeled $5 million worth of assistance to Cuba.

Speaking through an interpreter, Gutierrez told the American visitors she wanted them to know the realities of Cuban life. Admitting the island has its problems, Gutierrez assured the group the government was trying to correct them. One of the problems singled out by Gutierrez: the U.S. economic embargo.

Gutierrez portrayed her office’s role as coordinating between Cuban churches and the government, citing as an example the Cuban Evangelical Celebration, which attracted more than 100,000 people last summer. According to Gutierrez, the authorities worked together with church officials to pull off an event neither could have accomplished on its own.

Amiel Perez, current liaison between Churches of Christ and the Cuban government, spoke of the increasing openness toward Christian faith and his group in particular in Cuba.

“We are respected and given consideration by the government,” he told Religion News Service.

Perez said evangelical Christianity has been a powerful force in Cuba in the past few years as restrictions eased. He spoke of a youthful segment of the population that, finding the predominant materialist ideology “spiritually was empty, … has been discovering God.”


Churches of Christ in Cuba, which are affiliated with the 1.5 million-member Churches of Christ in the United States, have an estimated 80 congregations in Cuba.

DEA END PARKS

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!