Life in Cuba

These days, it’s impossible for Dr. Annia González to get anywhere in Siboney in a hurry. She doesn’t mind the interruptions. Women rush from their doorways to show her their babies and invite her to hold them. Most of the children almost didn’t get a chance at life. 

Today, González is heading to the home of yet another girl who, only this morning, applied for an abortion at the local health ­center. The center’s janitor recognized the girl and told González which home to visit. He has been her informant for years. Together, they make an unlikely but highly effective team. 

González’s message to the girl is to the point: “I believe that you want your baby. And that you would keep it if you had what you needed. I, and others from the church, will help you.”

It’s an unorthodox approach to pregnancy in this town on Cuba’s southern coast. Ten years ago, Cuba had one of the highest abortion rates in the world according to Johnston’s Archive, a website that tracks abortion data. But in 2025, not one baby in Siboney died at the hands of an abortionist, thanks mostly to González and her pro-life team. They are part of a growing movement, led by the island’s evangelical churches, to promote the sanctity of human life by providing hope and support to pregnant women, even as the country’s quality of life deteriorates.

Cuba’s pro-life movement began to gain traction in 2016 when the U.S.-based ministry PassionLife sent missionary teams to the country. González remembers the stunned silence that hung over her church as PassionLife CEO Mark Nicholson explained the value of human life. For the first time, she understood the biblical view of human value—something she’d not considered when she once sent her own patients to get abortions. She thought she was being kind to the mother, who often had only a cup of coffee for breakfast and a cigar at lunchtime to keep the hunger pangs at bay. And she thought she was doing the baby a favor by not exposing it to a life of empty supper bowls.

Another PassionLife team member, Jeanne Pernia, shared openly about her own abortions and the hundreds she had facilitated at her abortion center in Miami. Then she explained how God had turned her life around, allowing her to open a pregnancy help center in the building where she had once offered abortions. It was then that González realized each abortion prescription she had written was a death sentence, ­implicating her as a murderer.

“Until that moment, it was as if we still had blinders on that prevented us from seeing the situation our country was going through with the shedding of innocent blood,” she said.

González began to weep. Others in the congregation clutched their cheeks, stricken at what they had done. With Cuba’s annual abortion rate of 52.36 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age, all 75 members of Iglesia Bautista Playa Siboney have had some involvement with abortion.

González and four other women confessed their guilt on the spot and resolved to start a rescue movement in their own town. “We asked the Lord for guidance, saying, ‘Lord, we have no resources, but what can we do?’” González remembers.

PassionLife could have helped fund a center in Siboney. But the organization’s president, John Ensor, believed the local church needed to figure out how to do it on their own. “If a group gets foreign money to start a pregnancy help medical office, then it can’t reproduce,” he said. “Because the next town over will say, Well, we can’t do that because we don’t have foreign money.”

González and her newly formed team recognized they could not afford a building for a pregnancy care center, but they could make house calls. And so, equipped with a hand-held ultrasound machine, they began visiting pregnant women all over town.

A nurse and the janitor served as their eyes and ears at the local health clinic. When they found out that the clinic’s doctor had told 21 women to abort or expect fetal defects, González and her team visited each of them. After their house calls, only one woman chose abortion. Twenty babies were born within the year. Nineteen were healthy, but one, named Moses, had a heart defect.

At first, the doctors did not want to help Moses because they did not expect him to live. But when he turned 1, they agreed to operate. Recently, González helped celebrate his fifth birthday. “As Moses was rescued from the waters, Moses was also rescued from abortion, and today we enjoy him,” she said.

PASTOR ALFONSO BENS and his congregation at Iglesia Bautista Playa Siboney rallied around the new mothers, and child dedications started becoming commonplace. The Siboney pregnancy movement seemed unstoppable. Then, in late 2019, Bens, a central figure in the budding pregnancy care movement, had the chance to leave Cuba and took it.

Six decades of communism has taken its toll on the island, leaving many Cubans impoverished and angry. Between 2022 and 2023, Cuba lost 18% of its population to mass emigration to countries such as Venezuela, Russia, China, Guyana, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Some, like doctors, escape by signing up for volunteer programs from which they never return. Others get permission to take trips abroad and end up staying wherever they land.

Bens’ departure left the ministry team stunned, then angry. It soon fractured. González tried to hold everything together with the help of the PassionLife team, but when COVID hit, visits from the U.S. ceased, and González was left to pick up the pieces on her own. Cuba closed its borders for two years.

“All we could really do was pray,” Mark Nicholson remembers. “We would hear stories from them every once in a while, but communication wasn’t very good.” If González wanted to send Nicholson an email, she had to purchase a card and go to the public park where the government had installed Siboney’s only router in a tree. Sitting on a park bench, she could access the internet, a few seconds at a time, if she was lucky and the electricity was working.

Nicholson and Pernia didn’t know what they would find when they returned to Cuba in 2022. All they knew was that the ministry had split in two. They feared it might have fallen apart. “But when we came back, there were 22 babies that they had saved during COVID in that one church,” Nicholson said, the smile audible in his voice.

The split had created two strong pro-life teams in Siboney, both eager to save babies. Soon, other pastors learned about the life-saving work in Siboney and wanted to join in.

One of these pastors was Sandy Cancino, the director of the Evangelical League of Cuba, a group that incorporates all 23 government-sanctioned denominations. Cancino knew that, unlike his recent public challenge to the country’s same-sex marriage movement, the government would not censor his pro-life work. Cuba’s leaders wanted more babies to counter the country’s negative population growth and were happy for him to work toward that goal. That meant he could keep both his Facebook page and his travel license.

CANCINO BEGAN his national effort by bringing together the two pro-life groups in Siboney. Then he worked to give the Siboney church a vision for ending abortion across the nation, not just their neighborhood. Throughout Cuba, Cancino’s biblical teaching laid the groundwork for the pro-life movement. Churches were prepared to act in response to true conviction, rather than just relying on fleeting emotional responses.

González calls Cancino a godsend: “He organized this entire ministry so that throughout Cuba there were volunteer coordinators who began to work.”

Although Cancino works primarily with government-­approved churches, even unregistered churches are joining the movement. The Cuban government does not recognize any church established since the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Dr. Daliadne Mercedes attends one of these illegal churches, Iglesia del Espiritu Santo in Bayamo. While members of underground churches may have been persecuted in the past, Mercedes said her unregistered church meets openly and without opposition. She can only pinpoint one disadvantage for her congregation: The government only gives handouts to registered churches.

For 32-year-old Mercedes, independence from the government is a choice. She recently gave up her government position as a dentist with a steady $20-­per-month income to lead a pregnancy counseling team at her church. Mercedes considers this her calling: “When my eyes were opened to the circumstances of my nation, that moved my heart to do a little bit, even if it were a drop in an ocean.”

In the last two years, 20 such pregnancy care teams have mobilized across Cuba, bringing the total to 22.

Still, the challenges of living in Cuba are mounting. “With the shortage of food, basic supplies, medicines, electricity, and basic necessities, we face a real battlefield every day,” Mercedes said. Many families are still homeless after Hurricane Melissa swept over the island in late October 2025. Cuba, reliant on Venezuelan oil, also has suffered from the ongoing U.S. blockade. Without gas to power garbage trucks, trash has piled up on the streets. These mounds of waste have become breeding grounds for mosquitoes that spread diseases like Zika, dengue, and chikungunya. Bread lines snake for blocks, with people standing for hours to buy a loaf. Ration offices are empty. Shopkeepers only accept dollars for their wares, keeping the average Cuban from buying food.

Even farmers are no better off. The communist regime allows cattle farming but prohibits beef consumption. All beef is exported as a cash crop.

But churches are stepping in to meet as many needs as they can to support young mothers. “We look for women who can sew, who can make little clothes for the babies,” Gonzalez said. “We try to get provisions, to support them in whatever way we can, and it is wonderful to see how there are always brothers and sisters, children of God, willing to help.”

Cancino, Gonzalez, and Mercedes know that while circumstances play a role, every pregnancy crisis has a spiritual component. “The girl comes worried, comes with uncertainty,” Gonzalez said. “She needs support, she needs hope. Sometimes it is difficult for us to look around us and see the situation we are going through, but we look up and put our faith and trust in the Lord.”

One of Gonzalez’s volunteers often tells pregnant moms, “Every child is born with a loaf of bread under their arm.” In other words, if God created a baby, He will also provide for it. As the volunteers encourage the girls to pray and believe that God will see them through, many young moms put their faith in Christ. While abortion is decreasing, churches in Cuba are growing. In the early 1990s, Protestants were estimated to number about 70,000. Today, the U.S. government puts the number of Protestants at about 550,000—5% of Cuba’s overall population.

The nursery at Iglesia Bautista Playa Siboney is now full to the brim with toddlers. Schools also have seen a sudden increase in children. One teacher asked a volunteer, “How come I have so many students in my preschool this year?” She just smiled and said, “Glory to God, hallelujah! This is the work that the Lord is doing in this place.”

—Kerstin Hering is a mom of seven, president of NextGen Institute, a commissioned Colson Fellow, and a World Journalism Institute graduate