Christians are called to be the conscience of their time, to bring eternal principles to society where a Republic can be built. So, if a regime wants to undermine a strong Republic, it must undermine those who are willing to sustain it. The regime needs to conflate spiritual joy with political joy. By subverting the position of those who believe in justice and free elections, the regime achieves political power by eroding the social fabric.
Cuba is an iconic example of that danger that only comes step by step.
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During the first years of Hugo Chávez’s presidency, his trips to Havana began to become more frequent. Senior military officers and ministers also visited Cuba to hold political meetings. The political rapprochement and cultural exchange ended with the arrival of an army of Santeria priests who filled public companies, ministries, the governorships and the high ranks of the Armed Forces.
Raúl Baduel, former personal friend and defense minister of Hugo Chávez, does not doubt the purpose of that discreet invasion: “It was a plan by Fidel Castro, who, taking advantage of Chávez’s superstitious character, filled the upper echelons of these advisors to control who made decisions and informed their bosses in Cuba.”
Cuban totalitarianism, while crushing Christianity, found in the Yoruba faith a way to manipulate its political allies and part of the Cuban population, closely tied to the indigenous syncretization between Catholicism and cults of African origin.
Even today with Miguel Díaz-Canel, these connections are privileged, at a propaganda level at least, to accentuate an idea of popularity, of a supposed link with “Cubanness” and Cubans. Weeks after the 11J demonstrations, the dictator walked through the La Güinera neighborhood hand in hand with a well-known Santeria priestess, where there was one death and multiple injuries and arrests.
Iliana María Macías opened the doors of her house, in a block of prefabricated buildings, for Díaz-Canel to pay respects at the altar in her living room. She rang a bell at the altar and then told the state press, which introduced her as a “community leader”: “We have to ensure that Díaz-Canel does not feel alone, because there is a lot of flattery and everything is very nice, but it is not just lip service. Outside, it is in the heart, deep inside.”
The woman has been denounced as a collaborator of the political police for filming the protests of July 11, 2021 in that Havana neighborhood from her home and then delivering the videos to the authorities, so that specialists in facial and physical recognition could identify the protesters for subsequent prosecution.
On August 13, 2021, a “celebration” for the birth of Fidel Castro had also been staged in La Güinera, which included drumming by an Afro-Cuban music group and folk dances.
In 2023, another reference from the neo-Castro leadership: before a defining game of the World Baseball Classic that year, first lady Lis Cuesta asked the babalawos to “activate” to seek victory by throwing “shell and water” onto the field.
The Letter of the Year, a collection of annual recommendations and predictions about the national destiny produced by the Yoruba Cultural Association of Cuba, is very popular among followers of Afro-Cuban cults on the island. There have been no shortage of complaints that it has also been manipulated by the State with the consent of the priests who wrote it, possibly with the hope of controlling or guiding practitioners, with atomized hierarchical structures.
When in 2020 the Letter of the Year warned about the increase in embezzlement, violence, and the dismissal of a government caused by a coup d’état or intervention by an army, the President of the Yoruba Cultural Association, José Manuel Pérez Andino, called a press conference to emphasize that the “predictions” were not only directed at the island, that “nothing will happen internally,” that “the problems are in other countries” because in Cuba “religion and the State protect and educate to the population.”
Among the document’s recommendations in 2023, for example, were to resume health prevention measures, warn about the use of biochemicals in organic foods, and change mentality for the development of new “socioeconomic perspectives.” These were all in line with guidelines promoted by the State in its campaigns against the proliferation of dengue (depressed by the lack of fuel for fumigation), the planting of food products in homes for self-consumption in a contracted agricultural market, and the promotion of self-employment as a flag of a supposed opening on the island.
Among Afro-Cuban groups, a resistance has been erected, with leaders such as Loreto Hernández, imprisoned today by the dictatorship, who have promoted an independent Letter of the Year.
These reflections on the deification of the Revolution would be incomplete if we did not mention that an institutional sector of churches washes its face and openly deifies tyranny.
The bishop of the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Cuba, Reverend Ramón Miguel Benito Ebanks, said in 2006 that Fidel Castro’s orders would be “fulfilled by the entirety of our church” and that he wanted him to continue “enlightening and strengthening them to defend the price that this Revolution is necessary, which is the continuity of the Social Project that our Lord Jesus Christ bequeathed us through his apostles and his gospels.” Idolatry? “For Cuba, for the Revolution and for Socialism. Overcome. In the name of my Church and my own I speak and I am sure that we will be consistent with our ideas of Homeland or Death; Socialism for Life.”
Another painful example is that of the Federation of Baptist Churches of Cuba (Fibac), founded by the Reverend Raúl Suárez who, together with the Martin Luther King Memorial Center, promote a Liberation Theology that deifies socialism by comparing, equating, or considering it the fulfillment — a kind of earthly realization — of the doctrines of Jesus of Nazareth.
Fortunately, this group represents only a tiny minority of Christians. Of the million Protestants on the island, the churches with the largest membership are conservative, opposed to collectivism. According to The Christian Post, 92% of evangelicals belong to this group and others not recognized by the State. Castroism has tried to inoculate them, without complete success, with a poisonous political apathy or the applauding virus.
