(Read Part 1)

The socialist school system seeks to homogenize new generations through the use of political slogans and historical indoctrination. Within these spaces, religious faith is viewed as an unwelcome anomaly.

In 2019, officials from the Ministry of Education in the city of Nuevitas prohibited 12-year-old Leosdán Martínez — a Jewish student — from wearing a kippah while on school grounds. This ruling marked the culmination of a year spent enduring and reporting acts of harassment by other students — some of whom were the children of Communist Party officials. Bullying on grounds of conscience has also been directed at Christians.

In 2020, the then-president of the Christian Reformed Church of Cuba, Yordanys Díaz, reported that his 8-year-old son had been assaulted by a teacher because of his faith. The woman allegedly snatched a bracelet bearing the name of Jesus from him, forbidding him from wearing “religious jewelry.”

This was not the first time such an incident had occurred, as Díaz recounted in my documentary, “Cuba Crucis.” On another occasion, she had humiliated the boy in front of his classmates for stating that he believed in God.

In October 2023, teachers and administrators exerted pressure on Ruth, a five-year-old girl and the daughter of Pastor Raciel Vega Matos of the Cerro y Primelles Baptist Church in Havana. Why? For bringing her Bible to school, singing Christian songs during recess, and for refusing to participate in Halloween celebrations, acts glorifying the Revolution, or the recitation of slogans praising Fidel Castro and “Che” Guevara.

As punishment, they moved her desk away from the other children’s and forbade them from speaking to her.

Ruth developed psychological distress and a school-related phobia that compelled her parents to withdraw her from the public education system in March 2024 to homeschool her. Consequently, they were threatened with the loss of custody of Ruth under the provisions of the Castro regime’s “Families Code.”

The girl and her parents fled the country months later.

Regrettably, this is just another example of the prohibition against homeschooling minors and the violation of the right to choose the education provided to one’s children.

The most notorious case involved the pastoral couple Addya Expósito and Ramón Rigal, in the city of Guantánamo. They were subjected to relentless persecution — which, between 2017 and 2021, included police harassment, legal proceedings, and imprisonment.

The authorities separated the parents from their children because, following incidents of bullying (which included physical violence against their daughter), they decided to withdraw both her and her brother from the state school system and educate them at home, in accordance with their own values and away from the socialist propaganda that poisons the entire Cuban school curriculum.

Incidentally, I urge the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) to intervene in this matter: one of the repressors responsible for this family separation entered the United States during the previous administration.

Not only de facto, but socialist laws — such as the 2022 “Families Code” — also infringe upon the rights of Cuban minors, including Christians among them. Examples abound.

Following the “woke” trend, the regime presented it as an “inclusive,” “modern,” and progressive law (which is not the same thing as progress). It met with criticism and resistance from civil society, with the evangelical church — its members and leaders — at the forefront.

In April 2023, Katherin Acosta was summoned by the National Revolutionary Police. She was 7 years old. Her frail body was escorted into a police vehicle, where agents from the Camagüey Office for the Protection of Minors interrogated her. All of this was done in retaliation for the anti-Castro stance of her mother, the Catholic Marisol Peña Cobas.

According to the State, she was failing in her duty to instill in the girl respect and love for the Castros and for “President” Miguel Díaz-Canel. Peña Cobas replied: “God is the Supreme Being, and He compels no human being to worship Him, for He granted us free will. No man on Earth has the right or the power to force others to love and respect him — least of all if they are unworthy of the love and respect they demand.”

In June, the police forced her to flee Cuba alongside her husband and Katherin. They threatened to strip her of her “parental responsibility” under the new Family Code.

Pastor Arcadis Solano Silvera, of the Fourth Baptist Church in Santiago de Cuba, faced a similar situation. In 2022, an officer from the political police threatened to send his 15-year-old son to fulfill his mandatory military service. He invoked Article 6 of the Family Code, which asserted that a determination by “competent authorities under special circumstances” could separate the boy from his parents. The family departed for exile.

My wife and I also made the decision to leave Cuba so that our son could escape that grinder of spirits and critical thought known as the socialist educational system. How many more of us will have to flee our geographic Homeland to save our first homeland — the family. Change in Cuba is urgent, so that the nation and its children may smile once again.

This article is based on testimony submitted for the record of the USCIRF hearing on religious freedom violations against children (April 2026). Also, it is part of the Campaign FIN DEL ACOSO Y LIBERTAD PARA LAS VOCES DE LA VERDAD EN CUBA, by the platform for political communication LITORAL.