Cuba on the cusp

HAVANA—On a recent sunny morning on Cuba’s northern shore, a group of 15 Americans sat at two long tables in a small, wood-board church. Six fans hung on the wall—three with guards and three with blades exposed—blowing furiously to circulate the humid Caribbean air.

The church’s pastor of 12 years delivered a brief greeting in Spanish before the Americans, each teamed with a translator and a local church member, fanned out for evangelism. Carrying Bibles, they entered neighborhoods of dusty, pockmarked streets and walked door to door, greeting residents inside aging, dilapidated homes. Within hours, dozens of locals had professed faith in Christ: A young man dabbling in witchcraft in one home, a man with AIDS in another, a family of nonpracticing Catholics in another.

In four days of ministry, the American volunteers presented the gospel to 448 Cubans, and 339 professed faith in Christ. Local churches planned to follow up with each one. The surprising response rate reflects a deep spiritual hunger in the communist island nation—a hunger that has persisted for the past 25 years.

Missions organizations in the United States and Cuba worried last December when President Barack Obama’s administration announced plans to begin normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba after five icy decades. It wasn’t politics that caused the concern—it was the potential cooling effect that economic prosperity might have on Cuba’s burgeoning house church movement. One year after Obama’s announcement, a snapshot look at the country suggests that Cubans remain enthusiastic about hearing the gospel, and that political and economic changes remain a long way off.

“A year later my perspective is that change comes slowly,” said Galen Jacobs, a U.S.-based missionary who has worked in Cuba for more than 20 years. “How long is it going to take to build up an infrastructure that looks like war-torn Beirut? It’s going to take decades.”

In Havana, Cuba’s capital of 2 million inhabitants, the disrepair and decay have run rampant. Visitors are instructed to walk on the edge of the street, not on the sidewalk, where falling chunks of building debris can injure or kill passersby. Periodically word will spread of another old housing structure collapsing with residents trapped inside. New construction is nearly nonexistent.

Only the U.S. Congress can lift the Cuban embargo, a package of sanctions that went into full effect in 1962 under President John F. Kennedy. But the Obama administration has taken several steps toward resetting diplomatic relations in the past 12 months, such as easing travel and business restrictions, staging a high-profile handshake between Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro in April, and sending Secretary of State John Kerry to Havana to open a U.S. embassy in August.

These high-level changes have had little effect on average Cubans, especially outside Havana. Most people still don’t own a car (horse-drawn wagons are common) and aren’t allowed to operate a private business, own land, or access the internet. Public celebrations of Christmas were only legalized in the late 1990s. Cubans don’t know where Fidel Castro and top members of his government live, but they have a name for it—“Sector Zero”—where they believe the food is endless, the education good, and the cash abundant.

Despite the control, the government has allowed the church to flourish. A Protestant community that comprised only 0.5 percent of Cuba’s total population in 1990 has mushroomed to about 10 percent and dwarfs the number of church-attending Catholics. It’s also spawned a huge house church movement—tens of thousands of spiritual communities spanning an island of 11 million inhabitants.

The spiritual soil has remained fertile over the past 12 months, as life carries on in the same way it has for 60 years. In 2014 Baptists alone formed 1,579 new churches, including house churches, according to Kurt Urbanek of the Virginia-based International Mission Board. He expects church-planting statistics for 2015 to be similar.

“The receptivity [to the gospel] has not gone down,” said Urbanek, author of the 2012 book Cuba’s Great Awakening.

Urbanek and some other church leaders still wonder whether a potential economic resurgence resulting from U.S. policy changes might produce spiritual complacency among the island’s growing churches. “When commerce is growing, trade is growing, and you live in the big city, the temptation—Christian or non-Christian—is going to be carpe diem—seize the day,” Jacobs said. “The church there is still very focused on seizing the day spiritually, but the culture in the big city is distracted.”

Another problem, the exodus of church leaders, seems to have subsided for now, even as overall Cuban emigration has surged: The U.S. Coast Guard reported picking up 1,604 Cubans at sea between May and October, according to the Miami Herald, and more than 45,000 presented themselves at U.S. checkpoints along the Mexico border in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. In November Nicaragua, a Cuban ally, closed its border to Cubans, who were taking advantage of easy-to-obtain Ecuadorian visas and then traveling through Central America to the United States. On Dec. 1 the Cuban government announced it would require certain doctors to obtain a travel permit before leaving the island—an effort to stanch an ongoing brain drain.

Last year several key Cuban church leaders migrated to the United States (see “The fifth wave,” Feb. 7) amid concerns the Obama administration would end the 20-year-old “wet foot, dry foot” policy that grants them instant refugee status (Obama has since pledged to keep the policy). Now a new generation of leaders is emerging: Seminary enrollment is strong, and the International Mission Board has ramped up its efforts to develop trained pastors.

“The old guard leaving has opened up opportunity for a new generation of leadership in Cuba,” Jacobs said. “There’s a new wave of people who are in Cuba, they know Cuba’s changing, and they’re saying, ‘We’re going to stay here and push through God’s agenda in the new Cuba—whatever that becomes.’”

Cuban-American for president?

As relations thaw between America and Cuba, many have predicted the Republican presidential nomination contest will come down to two Cuban-Americans: Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Either candidate, if elected, would be the first Latino president.

Cruz, 44, stresses his Cuban heritage on the campaign trail, but hasn’t made Cuban policy a prominent part of his push toward the White House. Last year he called Obama’s Cuba announcement a “tragic mistake” and has since vowed to block any nominee for U.S. ambassador to the island.

Rubio has taken a more outspoken, hawkish approach and vowed to reinstate the sanctions that began a decade before he was born. He blasted the administration for not gaining more concessions from the Cuban government: “I’m prepared to change strategies toward Cuba, but it has to be one that yields results,” Rubio, also 44, told The Associated Press in November.