The fifth wave

José Garrigó was born in Havana, Cuba, days before Fidel Castro seized power on Jan. 1, 1959. Garrigó’s father, the president of the association of Cuban banks, became an adviser to the Castro government, even though he’d played a similar role for the previous government. It didn’t take long for him to fall out of favor—and then into prison.

In what Garrigó calls a miraculous turn of events, his father escaped and eventually took his family aboard an overcrowded flight to Spain in 1967. Garrigó was 8 years old. The family lived first in Madrid, then Barcelona, where as a young man Garrigó professed faith in Christ.

“We sort of grew up like the people of Israel,” he told me. “We grew up with pictures and stories of home.”

As a child Garrigó was too young to understand that his family was part of the second emigration wave from Cuba, following thousands who escaped at the time of the revolution. Two Castro-approved waves followed in 1980 and 1994. All four were designed to cast off undesirables, but pastors and Christian leaders also left in migrations that crippled the church for years afterward.

Now a fifth wave appears to be under way. Loosening restrictions since President Barack Obama took office have contributed to a gradual exodus, and the administration’s new effort to normalize relations is accelerating the process. Those factors combined with individual situations on the ground in Cuba are putting new pressures on the world’s fourth-largest house church movement.

“We’re hemorrhaging leaders, and it puts the movement in danger,” said the International Mission Board’s Kurt Urbanek, who said more than 500,000 Cubans have professed faith in Christ in the past 13 years through Baptist efforts alone. “If you have a mass exodus of your highly trained leaders, then where does that leave you?”

THE CHURCH IN CUBA has a relatively long, persecution-filled history. When Christopher Columbus claimed the island for Spain in 1492, he also claimed it for the Roman Catholic Church, which barred all non-Catholic religious practice for four centuries. In 1901, after the United States liberated Cuba from Spanish rule, a new constitution separated church and state.

Most religious activity, including missions work, flourished for much of the next six decades. That changed when the Roman Catholic Church openly and vehemently opposed Castro’s revolution. Once in power, Castro cracked down on all churches, prompting the first emigration wave that saw as much as 50 percent of the Protestant population flee. The suppression included bans on celebrating Christmas and all religious radio and television broadcasts. In 1962, government officials gathered up some 100,000 Bibles and 2,000 hymnals and ground them into powder at a Havana paper mill. In 1965, authorities arrested 53 Baptist leaders and accused them of being CIA spies.

By 1989, both the Protestant and Catholic communities had shriveled to about half their prerevolution size. Protestants accounted for only about 0.5 percent of the population, and practicing Catholics also comprised under 1 percent.

The spiritual climate changed sharply in 1990, when the fall of the Soviet Union ushered in what Cubans call the “special period in time of peace.” The USSR, focused on its own problems, yanked its military and economic support, including medicine, fuel, and food. Cubans began starving both physically and spiritually. “There were a lot of things promised to people, and they started to realize those promises weren’t going to come true,” said Hermes Soto, a Cuban pastor from 1964 to 2014. “They realized their hands were empty, and not only that, their hearts were empty.”

Protestant church attendance jumped some 400 percent between 1990 and 1994, according to Galen Jacobs, a missionary who has worked in Cuba for more than two decades. As churches grew, leaders requested permission to build new buildings, and the Office of Religious Affairs offered a compromise: house churches. Some 10,000 new churches were planted by the end of the decade. “It’s part of God’s sense of humor that Fidel was partly responsible for the house church movement,” Jacobs said.

Today Cuba has the fourth-largest church-planting movement in the world, trailing only China and two people groups in India. Christians meet in houses, old buildings, patios, backyards, and garages—almost anywhere you can imagine. The Baptist and Assemblies of God denominations alone account for more than 19,000 churches and missions around the island, according to the International Mission Board’s Urbanek, author of the 2012 book Cuba’s Great Awakening. “It has been a movement of God,” Urbanek said, noting Baptists didn’t have a written strategy until 2004. “They were just reacting to the onslaught of people flooding into the churches.”

In 2006 the Western Cuba Baptist Convention mission board organized 50 days of prayer to reach 1 million Cubans for Christ by planting 100,000 house churches and 13,000 traditional churches across all Protestant denominations. Although no one has an exact count, missions groups believe those thresholds have been surpassed. Protestants now comprise more than 10 percent of the Cuban population—roughly twice the number of Catholics who attend mass.

THE CUBAN ADJUSTMENT ACT OF 1966 and subsequent revisions to the law have made coming to the United States a very attractive proposition. Unlike immigrants from other countries, Cuban nationals can enter the United States without a visa and without passing a criminal background check. The “wet foot, dry foot” immigration policy, instituted during the Clinton administration, stipulates that once they step on U.S. soil, Cubans are instantly considered political refugees. They can obtain permanent residency after a year, and are put on the fast track toward citizenship. They also gain access to resettlement cash and welfare benefits.

Over the last 55 years, amid government efforts to jettison undesirables, it was often those with the connections and resources to get out of the country—the upper crust of society—who took advantage of opportunities to leave. In José Garrigó’s case, his parents owned a sprawling countryside farm they traded for a trip out of Cuba. Most who remained on the island became “exhausted, worn out, and hopeless,” said Dan Burrell, a former South Florida pastor who has traveled back and forth to Cuba almost 20 times since 2002. “The heavy hitters left.”

Many Christian leaders only stayed to continue spreading the gospel, but rules also gave them incentive to stay: While a Cuban pastor could use missions connections to travel to the United States legally, he usually couldn’t take his family, and not returning would prejudice the government against the missions organization with whom he worked. That began to change about three years ago, when the Cuban government started allowing most people to leave the island without exit visas and the Obama administration started issuing five-year multi-entry visas “like candy.”

With the pressure to stay removed, Urbanek told me Baptists have lost roughly 75 of 450 trained pastors—shared between 7,431 churches, house churches, and missions—in the last three years. Across all denominations the number of lost pastors is likely in the hundreds.

In 2014 one of three Baptist seminaries on the island lost its entire administrative leadership staff in a three-month period. Hermes Soto, 70, the seminary director since 2002, was among them. He told me he stayed so long because of the great spiritual needs of the people, but after his health began failing and his wife had a bout with cancer, it was time to join his two sons and grandchildren in the United States. He worries that not enough pastors will stay to continue the work: “If I could tell them anything, it would be to think about the Lord first and put their own needs secondary. After 50 years, I feel I have succeeded.”

In December the Obama administration amped up the pressure to leave when it announced plans to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle criticized the move because it didn’t include any significant concessions from the Cuban government, signaling Congress is unlikely to take the necessary steps to drop the trade embargo. “Normalizing relations with Cuba cannot be a one-way street,” said New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who said human rights should be the center of any rapprochement.

Obama’s announcement stoked fears that the current “wet foot, dry foot” policy could soon end. The U.S. Coast Guard reported a significant spike in the number of people trying to reach the United States as the two nations prepared for high-level talks on Jan. 21-22 in Havana. There is “more pressure on those that have any thought of leaving,“ Jacobs told me. “It’s like now or never, which in the short term could create a greater brain drain.”

In the long run, however, normalizing relations could help keep Cuban pastors on the island. At least 1,800 Cubans are enrolled in formal theological education, more than ever before, although some are studying nonpastoral vocations. These numbers could produce tremendous fruit. Baptists estimate 800 annual conversions for every trained pastor during the 13-year period in which more than a half-million Cubans made professions of faith at evangelistic meetings. That doesn’t include evangelistic activity during the week. “I have the utmost respect for those who choose to stay instead of coming to a country they perceive to be Disneyland,” Jacobs said.

While an open Cuba is an answer to prayer, it also raises myriad challenges aside from people leaving the island. Missionaries voiced concern that vices such as gambling, pornography, and sex tourism will increase, and economic opportunities may curb hunger for the gospel.

“Today we have only God, but tomorrow we may have choices,” said Cristobal Tan, 48, pastor at Iglesia Las Buenas Nuevas, a church begun in 1953 by American missionaries in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba. “We have to prepare God’s people to know how to choose.”

THE FUTURE OF CUBA’S REVIVAL is also what most concerns José Garrigó, who finally returned to the island in 2013. He was excited to see how much he remembered from his childhood, but he was “very, very sad to see the state of decay of the Havana that I left.” The family farm was destroyed, as was his school. Garrigó broke down when he saw his childhood playmate, Maritza, for the first time in 46 years.

Garrigó, who now lives in Colorado, oversees the Cuba work of Alpha para Latinos, an organization promoting evangelistic discussion groups around the world. His 2013 visit was intended to be a mostly exploratory trip, but it turned into a training for 130 people representing more than a dozen denominations. He saw “phenomenal” hunger for the gospel and a young, vibrant church that enjoys relative freedom in the current conditions: “They are not just preaching, they are living the gospel.”

Garrigó, who still calls Cuba “my country,” supports the U.S. policy change but worries it will encourage people to leave the island or pursue financial prosperity. “The search for meaning and hope could be blurred,” he said. “People are very open, because they are hopeless and don’t have anywhere to turn. If the lifting of the embargo kills that, it’s going to be sad.”

—with reporting by Nat Belz in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba