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Around the time of the Lady in White protests, Nancy visited the Novedades Divinas Church, of the Evangelical League of Cuba, in Old Havana, near the Port of Havana. Even so, she attended the church of Santa Rita de Casia, in the capital’s Miramar neighborhood, on Sundays. The Catholic church, perhaps the most famous place where they interceded in prayer for freedom and where their weekly marches started, was one of the centers of the women’s movement’s activism.

“Family is a priority. My conscience was at peace. My conviction that I was doing God’s will was total,” Nancy said when we talked about the subject. She understood her attendance at that church not as a surrender of her faith, but as an opportunity to commune with other women of different religious beliefs, willing to fight against totalitarianism. It was an exemplary “ecumenical” action that she took.

Week after week, they were violently detained by an army of PNR and State Security personnel, who transported them to places far from urban centers, such as the Tarará Police School, where they were subjected to torture with beatings and humiliation. International media and independent projects such as Sats State documented the abuses.

By that time, Nancy believed, God had called her to raise her voice for all political prisoners, including her husband, Jorge, who had been arrested that fateful day in 2003 along with 75 other opponents, journalists, writers, and activists. The order had been expressly given by Fidel Castro. “Fighting for justice and peace is the duty of every Christian,” Nancy told me from exile, in the United States.

When describing the Ladies in White, she confessed that they became a family united by pain and the need to make visible to the world the injustices of Castroism by imposing extensive sentences after summary trials without procedural guarantees. Jorge was sentenced to 18 years in prison and sent to Guantánamo prison. Nancy couldn’t believe he was sentenced to almost two decades behind bars for defending free speech.

She has recognized that her Christian faith and the desire for the freedom of Cuba as part of the same language, of the same feeling. The ideas of the North American Revolution of the 18th century were echoed in the words of the Cuban activist.

“We were born free and we have the right, granted by the Creator, to live in freedom and fight for it,” she considered. “When you read the Scriptures, you encounter a God who loves justice, freedom, peace, love, and life. The message of salvation exhorts us to renew our minds in order to change our lives and the environment in which we find ourselves.”

This change, in her opinion, is capable of freeing us from molds and patterns imposed by political and religious systems. Nancy likes to remember the words of Jesus when he says that knowing the truth makes humans free and that where the Spirit of God dwells, there is freedom. Faith, the woman said when we spoke, strengthens individuals and connects them. “That is why totalitarian systems fear women and men who project genuine faith, because they know that they will not be able to break them.”

Faith, for Nancy, has a name: Jesus. “He has been my refuge, my strength, my healer, my hope and my helper. When Jorge was sentenced to 18 years, I felt the voice of God telling me in my heart: ‘Have faith, Jorge will be released before his sentence is two years old. Earthly judges do not have the last word, I have it, have faith.’”

For her, faith has to be tested and grow in the midst of adversity. And she undoubtedly grew up in the weeds of repression, threats, acts of repudiation, harassment against her family, intimidation, and threats of murder towards her person.

“The political police did everything possible to silence me, but they couldn’t thanks to my convictions and my faith. When my husband’s health deteriorated and his life was in danger, I understood that this illness was not for death but to glorify the name of God,” she said. “My job was to believe, pray, denounce, and fight alongside my sisters so that justice would be done.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists reported in the summer of 2004 that Jorge suffered from intense abdominal pain caused by chronic colitis, and decompensated blood pressure, something he had never suffered before.

Nancy made a pact with God for the release of her husband on December 6, 2003. Due to his health condition, on December 6, 2004, he was given an extra-penal license. The joy of having Jorge next to her again came after 20 months and 18 days of confinement. From that moment on, she repeats that as long as believers work on what is possible, God will take care of doing the part that is humanly impossible.

Like his wife had done years before, Jorge began to congregate in 2005 at the Novedades Divinas Church, of the Evangelical League of Cuba, under the pastorate of first Eulis Leiva and then Gilberto Rodríguez. There he participated in the worship ministry by singing or playing the piano, a talent that he later developed professionally.

Nancy taught biblical topics to small groups that met in private homes (a cell teacher) and to youth groups, as well as in the Ladies Ministry of the local church and in others where she was a guest. Throughout this journey she developed communication and leadership skills that contributed to her work in human rights projects.

In September 2012, Nancy founded an independent women’s healing and restoration ministry that she called Women, Don’t Leave Your Place. When she talked about the project, she defined it as “truly inclusive,” in that her messages did not exclude men.

Along with their ministerial work, and since Jorge was released from prison, the couple did not stop working to promote individual freedoms on the island.

In Nancy’s case, repression escalated to alarming levels. “Going out onto the street meant certain arrest. Part, without a doubt, of the manual of psychological torture implemented by the military to break the person and destabilize the family.”

She was put under house arrest for several days at the end of 2019. Mara Tekach, then the United States chargé d’affaires in Havana, broke the police cordon in front of the activist’s house to show her solidarity. During her visit the authorities cut off the power to her apartment.

Nancy had been arrested six times in just four months. In her last case, political police officers took her to the Unit on Cuba and Chacón streets, in the capital, where a man who identified himself as Major Alejandro threatened her.

The soldier pressured the woman with a low blow: if she continued with her activism, she would never leave Cuba again, nor would her children, residing abroad, be able to visit her on the island. Once free, Nancy and Jorge noticed that the neighborhood surveillance network, with informants from the political police and a PNR patrol, remained attentive to their movements.

They endured months of mental and emotional exhaustion, right up until she went into exile with her husband. For her, the pillars that kept her standing were the conviction that she was doing the right thing, and faith in God, her spiritual armor. Once again, her prayer and her promises in the Bible strengthened her.

Jorge and Nancy felt convinced that fighting for Cuba’s freedom is a historical privilege. In her opinion, the ideal of freedom has a close relationship with Christianity because it is in human conscience. “Free will, deciding from conscience, is a right, and no one has the authority to restrict our freedoms of expression, movement, and thought. Freedom has to be loved and defended because God gave it.”