Read Part 1

When Nancy’s husband Jorge was converted and baptized in April 1998, she experienced a collision inside the church. Jorge was already a well-known dissident figure, especially for his journalism. An Adventist leader named Ariel told him that to stay in the congregation, he had to abandon activism.

Seventh-day Adventist churches in Cuba can take these types of measures, called defraternization, with members who commit and continue living in sin, or who fail to comply with moral norms preached by the denomination. Neither of them applied to Jorge.

“We do not know exactly what the true motives behind the ultimatum were, but I do not rule out the influence or pressure of the political police. All the organizations in the country, including the churches, are infiltrated by State Security,” considered Nancy, almost 25 years after the event.

Although she acknowledges that they did not expel them, she was so outraged by the conditioning that she, after expressing her objection supported by Scripture, communicated to the local leadership her decision to no longer attend that church. She told them that her greatest interest was to be inscribed in the Book of Life, and that she shared the same ideas as her husband.

Faced with the growing rise of the opposition movement, and taking advantage of international attention on the war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, hundreds of political police agents and the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) were deployed throughout the country and in a synchronized manner against peaceful opponents, independent journalists, human rights defenders, and librarians.

They raided a hundred homes, interrogated their residents, confiscated their computers, photos, fax machines, and typewriters. According to Castroism, the opponents participated in the provocations and subversive activities led by the head of the United States Interests Section in Cuba, James Cason. However, the majority of those imprisoned had never visited that delegation, much less met the North American diplomat.

From April 3 to 7, 2003, in a chain of summary trials, the defendants received sentences ranging from six to 30 years in prison. The hardest thing for Jorge was not the fact that he was only able to see his lawyer for about eight minutes before the oral hearing of the trial. It was the nine months, almost half of the sentence, he spent in an isolation cell. Nonetheless, loneliness and abuse did not break the man.

He says he has become convinced that God allows trials as a way to spiritual growth. “Although at some point discouragement and doubt appear, it has to be something temporary, ephemeral, if we really trust in his promises.”

Understanding that undergoing suffering for following Christian virtues (say, justice and truth) as a way to get closer to God has a strong meaning within Christianity. In turn, dedication to faith (in God’s protection here and in eternal life if death comes) and a theological-social conviction strengthened Jorge.

“Slavery is not compatible with the redemptive message of the Holy Scriptures,” he stated. “We have lived in Cuba for too long under laws that go against the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual integrity of human beings. That is unacceptable from a Christian perspective. We must continue to advocate for emancipation with concrete actions and trusting in God’s timing. In the calendar of divinity, Cuba’s freedom is marked. I will never doubt it.”

The memory of the prison that hovered in his head decades later was marked by clouds of mosquitoes, putrid food, drinking water contaminated with mud, and the two-hour family visits every three months.

Deprived of sunlight and human contact, his only companions were wasps, lizards, and frogs in food. All of that triggered health problems in his body that he had been carrying since the war in Africa.

The other support he clung to was his marital union, a sign and image of the alliance between God and his church. Nancy’s letters and the hopes she gave him in phone calls enlivened Jorge’s spirit.

The fact that she and other women founded the Ladies in White changed the game in the demand for freedom. “We were the first protest organization that managed to demonstrate peacefully in the streets through various civic actions, drawing attention inside and outside of Cuba,” Nancy said, and international recognition attests to this.

In 2005, the entity received, together with the Nigerian lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim and the Reporters Without Borders organization, the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Conscience, awarded annually by the European Parliament. The Ladies in White protested peacefully every Sunday in a ritual: they attended religious services in different churches in the country, where they asked for the freedom of their loved ones, and then they marched with a flower in their hands through central roads, such as Fifth Avenue, west of Havana.

“Thank God, the Ladies in White emerged,” Jorge did not hesitate to tell me.

On those walks Nancy was accompanied by other evangelical women, all founders of the movement, such as Elsa Morejón, Bárbara Rojo, and Margarita Borges, wives of the political prisoners Oscar Elías Biscet, Omar Ruíz Hernández, and Edel José García, respectively.

Although women of the Catholic faith joined in the protests, Nancy remembers the prevailing harmony to this day. “There was a common objective of the first order that surpassed any discrepancy in the doctrinal or religious sense: our relatives were behind bars facing inhumane conditions. We needed to do everything possible to draw attention to this matter,” she confessed.

Nancy remembered that the book of Ecclesiastes talked about everything having its season, and everything under the heavens having its hour. “Knowing your place when difficult times come is essential to not lose focus. When you know that you are doing the right thing and in a more defining sense, what God expects of you, that will be enough for nothing and no one to stop you.”

Her time, the woman believed, had come to raise her voice for her husband and all the unjustly imprisoned prisoners. “The pain of one was the pain of all.” She remembered the call in the book of Proverbs to raise our voices for the voiceless, to defend the rights of the dispossessed.

Read Part 3