One Year Later: How Cuban Evangelicals Powered The Revolution ‘11J’
Pro-Cuban government protesters in Cienfuegos, Cuba, on July 11, 2021. Creative Commons photo.
HAVANA — Marcos Évora’s camera shuttered. Skinny arms, full of tattoos, were held high in front of a row of police officers. Again it clicked. A military man in a black beret raised a baton in front of unarmed people. Click. Hundreds of Cubans, mostly young men, marched in front of the Capitol.
That July 11, 2021, called “11J” by Cubans, was immortalized in the young man’s Canon camera, the same camera that helped him launch his photography business and capture memories at his Baptist church.
It was the largest protest seen in Cuba in 62 years, since the socialist Cuban Revolution. And Évora’s camera let the world see the courage of everyday Cubans risking attacks and harsh jail sentences to speak out against their government, many inspired to do so by their Christian faith. The series of protests against the Cuban government and ruling Communist Party lasted seven days, triggered by a shortage of food and medicine and the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I didn’t hear it, they didn’t tell me, I didn’t see it on the Internet,” he recounted on Facebook. “I was there, together with many brothers marching and seeing, for the first time, a hope for my Cuba. I was surprised at how everyone walked with their hands up in a sign of peace, shouting ‘Libertad!’ and saying out loud what for many years they couldn’t shout freely for fear.”
His camera also captured the brutality of the police crackdown, resulting in nearly 1,500 arrests. Today 701 Cubans remain in jail, facing sentences on charges of sedition, sabotage and public disorder. His images of the protests went viral after more than 7,000 people shared his post on Facebook and news agencies republished his photos.
“It hurts me to think that one day I will have to live outside of (Cuba) because of people who don’t know how to do things,” Évora said earlier this year. Today, like many other Cubans who were part of the protests, Évora has resettled abroad. He now lives in Madrid.
One year later, many Cubans are still inspired by the protests. Faith leaders are accompanying the victims of the repression and sending messages of hope to those affected by the arrests. At the same time, many faith leaders are leading a movement to stop the Communist government from introducing a swath of reforms, including one that would legalize same-sex marriage, by updating a family code that dates back to the times of Fidel Castro in 1975.
What the protests were like
As Évora found himself in the middle of the crowd that day last summer, a friend called him on his cellphone. He advised him to leave the demonstration, saying, “many ‘civilians’ were arriving with sticks.” By the time Évora realized the men were actually State Security officers, the political police and socialist sympathizers, it was too late.
The plainclothes police, armed with batons and pistols, along with a mob carrying sticks, surrounded Évora and other protesters in Máximo Gómez Park in Old Havana, Évora said.
Évora said he wasn’t able to take photos of them for fear that they would break his camera. The Cubans protesting held only cellphones and a few bottles of water, he said, yet officers advanced on the demonstrators. “They were hitting and beating, and the special forces supported them by threatening anyone who came to help,” Évora said.
He escaped “with God’s help and unique mercy,” he said, with two friends from the Evangelical League of Cuba.
At the same time, sisters Maria Cristina Garrido and Angélica Garrido were protesting in a small town in Mayabeque province called Quivicán. Maria Cristina alternated between adjusting her face mask and — with shouts of “Freedom!” — urging several people who were walking next to her to exercise their right to public protest. In a Facebook live video she shared, a group can be seen advancing peacefully along the dusty sidewalks of the town toward the central park.
There, Ministry of the Interior forces waited for them, said María Cristiana shortly before the end of her Facebook live transmission. They arrested the sisters.
Those waiting in jail
The sisters belong to an independent evangelical community in Quivicán. Jennifer Reyes Garrido, one of María Cristina Garrido’s two daughters, explained that they — her mother and aunt — do not belong to any denomination registered in the government’s Registry of Associations. “My mother used to meet at the church in Havana, specifically in Lawton,” she said. “I can’t tell you the name of the pastor because there isn’t one. There is no status like in the traditional denominations; we are all pastors. And we used to meet in Quivicán too.”
In early January, Michael Valladares, Garrido’s husband, said to Martí Noticias that the prison authorities prohibited both young women from meeting with their families at the same time during prison visits. According to him, the government seeks to separate the family and force them to travel twice a week to the prison, far from their place of origin. The host of the forum Prisoners of Castro, Claudio Fuentes, added that this placed greater economic strain on the family, a considerable burden in the midst of the nation’s gravest crisis of the 21st century.
On Jan. 18, 2022, the Cuban writer Amir Valle — also an evangelical and exiled in Germany — published through his publishing house, Ilíada, a collection of poems by Garrido titled, “Of Poetic Excellence.” The proceeds were meant to support her.
Valle wrote of her, “She has stood up for many of her fellow writers and intellectuals on the island who remain silent. Let’s not leave her alone!”
On Wednesday, Jan. 19, the U.S. Embassy in Havana in a tweet denounced the arbitrariness of the process against the Garrido sisters and condemned that they had been physically and psychologically mistreated in prison.
Luis Rodríguez, Angélica Garrido’s husband, told Martí Noticias that in the last visit before the trial at Women’s Prison of the West in Guatao, Havana, she was “firm in her ideals, in her faith in the Lord,” although “she was somewhat anxious about what may happen to her.”
On Thursday, Jan. 20, the trial against the Garrido sisters and 22 other participants in the 11J protests in the province opened. Angélica was facing a 10-year prison sentence for the alleged crimes of contempt, attempted assault and public disorder. María Cristina faced 15 years for the same charges. Her Facebook broadcast let the world know that a small town called Quivicán was also joining the national rebellion.
After 11J, other Cuban believers — more public figures — took advantage of their visibility on social media to speak in favor of the peaceful demonstrators and against the police violence committed by the Communist Party. YouTuber Ivan Daniel Calas, who directs the “Voice of Truth” channel, highlighted in a July video that there were pastoral families crying for imprisoned members. He was referring to those of pastors Lorenzo Rosales, Yéremi Blanco and Yarián Sierra.
The Christian rapper Danay Suárez, nominated for the Grammy awards multiple times and winner of the Gaviota de Plata award, said, “Cubans are manifesting spontaneously, tired of the toxic government-people relationship,” adding, “the authoritarian party in its constant monologue does not listen, does not protect, does not love, and does not liberate.”
“Cuba’s solution is not to get out of a bad marriage to enter into another one. Those who give combat orders to armed children against their unarmed siblings should not talk about the ‘Family Code,’” she posted, in reference to the controversial draft legislation that limits the right of parents to choose the education of their children in a preferential manner and introduces gender ideology.
She challenged popular Cuban artists: “Where are you? Will you now wash your hands like Pontius Pilate?”
On her Facebook profile, Suárez denounced how “at the work centers they ordered the workers to congregate and march in a public act of repudiation of the demonstrations that occurred spontaneously; it will surely be in the so-called anti-imperialist tribune to be televised worldwide.”
Since the state is the largest employer, it is easy for the unions — unified under the command of the official Workers’ Central Office since the 1960s — and organizations such as the Party and the Union of Youth to pressure the citizenry to attend mobilizations of “revolutionary reaffirmation.”
Reggaeton artist Yomil, singer Leoni Torres and actor Yuliet Cruz also raised their voice against the repression. But they were the exception among the best-known Cuban artists.
Spreading hope
Another Facebook post she shared, using the hashtag #OramosPorCuba (We Pray for Cuba), included a video clip from her her song “With love, without a revolver,” filmed in Havana. She sings, “Heaven is moving in favor of Cuba, God has already heard the lament of his people and cannot be silenced.”
Meanwhile, the most important Christian troubadour of the moment, Eric Méndez, shared on social media another song, this one in its entirety.
“I dream of a country that is multicolor, / where there is room for all of us. / A nation where we care about the pain / of him who thinks like me and him who doesn’t. / Where you don’t hate me because I believe in God, / and I don’t hate you because you don’t. / Where you can rise up and say ‘Yes’ / without having to veto me for saying ‘No.’ …
“Where to live not be something / decreed by the party. / Where it’s not always zero in the numbering / While your luck wins out whether it’s fixed or continuous. / A country where we don’t talk about the sense / that punishments are coming. / And not wear the heart in mourning, / because of the rejection that clouds our reason. / All the poets have said that love / cannot be removed from the equation.”
Crackdown on religious speech
Weeks after the demonstrations, in August, there was talk of nothing else in the independent media and among Cubans, no matter their political persuasion. That was when the National Revolutionary Police summoned Yuri Pérez Osorio to threaten him with fines and jail. The crime? He had hung on the front window of his house a sign with a verse from the book of Isaiah in the Bible.
“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey, and robbing the fatherless!” it read, with a call for repentance in the second part. Within the context of 11J, those words had a clear meaning.
Osorio, however, was summoned to the police station without a clear reason, as reported by his friend Yunier Enríquez on Facebook. No explicit reference to the verse was made. In his post he explained that those who participated in the nationwide protests were being summoned by the police, but on 11J Osorio was in a hospital after his mother contracted COVID-19.
“I still don’t know what is happening or how they are treating him, nor do I know if they will let him return home, but if he does not retract, I very much doubt that they will let him go free,” said Enríquez amid the uncertainty. “Only God can work such a miracle in the midst of this lamentable reality in Cuba.”
In a publication made later, Enríquez shared an update about Osorio: Police allowed him to return home, but he was told he had to take down the sign, or he would be detained.
“Yuri was able to preach to all the officers there and only responded with the word of God,” Enríquez said. “This further agitated the officers, who, powerless, could do nothing but threaten him. He remains firm in his conviction to keep the sign. We continue to pray.”
Christian support for Cuba
While the tension inside Cuba was still palpable, on July 13, 2021, pastors, priests, leaders, lay people and members of the Cuban church in the diaspora launched an open letter stating, “We do not forget our people in Cuba. We feel the responsibility to raise our voices.” The group declared “support for the people, a people suffering from hunger, needs, spiritual and material shortages” and called on the international community “not turn its face away from the Cuban reality, to not continue in its complicit silence, and to join in an international intervention which in the Cuban situation can no longer be delayed.”
From abroad, Christian nondenominational organizations, such as Outreach Aid for the Americas, sent food and supplies to the families of 11J prisoners.
Many registered Cuban Protestant institutions did not remain silent — at the expense of various reprisals, such as losing, as at the beginning of the revolution, their legal status. The largest denominations, for example, issued clear public statements in favor of individual liberties repressed by the socialist system. At the same time, they did not forget their role as peacemakers and called for an end to violence.
On July 13, Moisés de Prada, superintendent of the Assemblies of God, the largest Protestant denomination on the island, released a video on social media calling for the “cessation of repression” and hostilities. “We call the authorities and the people to sanity,” he wrote. “Violence begets violence and the results are dire. Afterwards we will not be able to look each other in the face.”
That same day, the Evangelical League of Cuba issued a statement defending the right to peaceful demonstration. It called on Cuban authorities to “listen to the voice of the people and offer solutions based on justice and peace.”
“We call upon the members of our institution to act according to biblical principles. Love God above all things. Love others as ourselves. Forgive regardless of the offense. To love our enemies. To serve without expecting anything in return. To act justly. To be no respecter of persons. To be peacemakers. To be merciful. To pray for those who persecute us and do evil.”
This part, almost at the end of the document, shows how the LEC — the abbreviation for Evangelical League of Cuba in Spanish — recognizes that among the anti-system demonstrators there must have been members of the church, as indeed there were. Some of them, like so many other Cubans, left Cuba for fear of being identified in the many videos of the demonstrations that circulated online and end up being tried under sentences of up to 20 years in prison.
On July 17, the board of directors of the Methodist Church in Cuba issued a statement stating that it had been called to stand by the people and rejecting “the repressive manner used against the demonstrating population.”
“Confrontation and violence only generate death, pain, mourning, and insecurity,” declared the Protestant denomination, one of the three largest on the island. “To refuse to listen to the voice of those who peacefully protest, is to close the only window for understanding and living in peace.”
Leaders of different denominations and from various positions of authority took to social media to express themselves in favor of peaceful protest and the rights of Cubans on the island, where freedom of assembly and expression are prohibited even more strictly in the context of a public health and economic crisis.
“A genuine Christian faith will never allow a believer to coerce, impede, intimidate, and, much less, repress another person for expressing his or her beliefs,” said Pastor Daniel González García in an address on Facebook.
The Baptist leader, whose ministry is based in Havana, opposed the regime’s request to several workers to form brigades to repress those who demonstrate. Through a personal anecdote, García decried that recruiting people to beat or impede the exercise of individual liberties by other Cubans is not a new practice of the dictatorship — since in the 1990s, when he was studying electrical engineering at City University Jose Antonio Echeverria in Havana, he was pressured, in vain, to engage in similar acts.
In another video, also shared on social media, the historian of the Western Baptist Convention, Carlos Sebastián Hernández Armas, recalled that on July 11, in the midst of “the current economic and health crisis, the repression against political dissidents and the impact of social media on young people, has been the straw that broke the camel’s back of years and years of hardship for the Cuban people.”
“I give my full support to the Cubans who have risen up to legitimately ask to be granted the rights we have been deprived of for more than six decades: among them, social freedom, freedom of conscience, material prosperity, the right to choose the kind of government we want and the rulers we want.”
Armas also stressed his support for the right to peaceful demonstration with an “understanding that the rulers are public servants who owe it to the people and not the people to them.” He, having been defamed several times by state media and part of the list of hundreds of citizens whom the government has banned from leaving the island in recent years, “totally” rejected the position of President Miguel Díaz-Canel when on July 11, 2021, he ordered communists and revolutionaries to confront peaceful demonstrators in the streets.
Regarding his pastoral and personal position on whether Christians and the church should participate in the nation’s political and social life, Armas pointed out that Baptists maintain the separation of church and state as one of the “most influential principles in the world,” while accepting that “in none of its forms does this principle prevent the church from participating and expressing its opinion in defense of human and social rights, as well as on the social and political freedoms of a nation.”
“The church can and should raise its voice and do what it can to bless the nation in which it exists and where its faithful live,” Armas said.
With respect to the biblical teaching on obedience to civil authorities, he said this also has its limits, pointing to an excerpt from the “Declaration of Faith and Baptist Principles of the Western Baptist Convention,” which says the state that “pretends to usurp divine authority cannot count on the support and obedience of the true believer in that particular case.”
“I believe this is our current situation,” Armas explained. “The Cuban government has tried to remove God from his throne and play the role of God to exercise tyrannical control, over everything, but without the love and justice of God.”
Toward the end of his speech, Armas appealed to his brothers and sisters in the faith: “I believe and teach that every believer can participate in the political and social life of his country and cannot abide by the authority of a government that goes outside of its sphere assigned by God,” understanding as such its intention to “dominate also over the spheres in which God did not give it authority: the conscience of each individual, the family, work, the church and the social sphere. … We have the right and the divine obligation to dissent.”
‘The divine obligation and right to dissent’
The evangelical producer Sandy Cancino spoke about the anti-government manifestations on the island and about the misrepresentation in the official media — the only legal news sources in Cuba — which show the protests as violent and their participants as “scourges.”
“I was left astonished watching and hearing Cuban diplomats in Spain saying that in Cuba the police and the army don’t suppress the people,” Cancino said. “How do they dare ignore what the same news channel has confirmed (the death of a Cuban as a consequence of the regime’s repression)?
“If there are mercenaries in Cuba, it is those in the mass media. They justify all that is wrong and still get thousands of pesos, awards and promotions. Who is going to tell the president that he incited confrontation?”
The religious leader also commented on social media, “Is not the ‘revolution’ a bastion of truth? What is truth? Currently the political system has lost its mask of justice. They are capable of publishing in the newspaper things such as, ‘In Cuba no one is punished for their way of thinking.’ That is a lie, they are liars, and they just try to convince the so called ‘revolutionaries.’”
Cancino asked why there shouldn’t be a dialogue between communists and those who think differently, even those considered dissidents, lamenting that “prisoners of conscience will be multiplied because there is a country called Cuba that has always taken the wrong course when it comes to recognizing diversity of thought.”
Cancino said that since he won the award for best project in development from the International Radio and TV Festival in 2017, “the ICRT owes him a prize,” referring to the censorship that has been carried out so that the project, a children’s television program with Christian values, could continue. He added, “(I have been) defamed in order to pit Cuba’s pastors against me and to limit the national ministry that I lead. They understand that the end justifies the means, and with that premise they feed the minds of the ‘revolutionaries.’ It must be so hard for the ‘confused revolutionaries!’ A new term for those who have awakened to the reality of the system, those whom, without a doubt, they will try to convince again. …
“What happened in Cuba on both sides, first, was motivated by the governmental leadership; then, by the hate that has grown as a result of the lack of opportunities and the physical and psychological suppression to which we Cubans are subjected. Yes, even the revolutionary and the communist is still pressured psychologically. Is there a revolutionary who has not felt pressured by the government? How many have gone out to abuse others without really desiring to do it?”
In the days following July 11 and 12, evangelical leaders who usually confront state authorities raised their voices as well as others who on rare occasions have directly and publicly confronted the Castro regime. Cancino and Armas were among them , but many other leaders spoke.
The pastor of the LEC, Abdiel Nieto, lamented seeing the streets in Havana “totally militarized” with the presence of “police, military men, special troops, state security agents dressed as civilians and others who were called to stop any peaceful manifestation.”
The youngest son of the pastor, Alejandro Nieto Selles, commented on the fact that the government press said “all is peaceful,” asking, “What are you so afraid of that you bring so much repressive power into the streets?”
“Why do they keep calling criminals anyone who has a different political approach or way of thinking? Why do they continue denigrating, offending and slandering everyone who has expressed themselves with respect and with the hope to be listened? … Why do they keep sowing hate and continue dividing the people? When is this going to stop? What else needs to happen? How many wounded people and casualties will be enough for you?”
In July 2021 Nieto’s older brother, Noel Nieto, who is co-pastor at the LEC, parked the church car outside of Valle Grande Prison. A member of the congregation had asked him for a ride there, in the suburbs of the capital, to pick up one of his best friends, who was going to be released since his detention on July 11.
They took the long Avenue 51, leaving behind the rotunda and the hills of the Bride of Noon, and arrived on the plains where the penitentiary is located. They waited a moment before picking up the friend. They saw men coming out of the prison, all going toward the highway. They were going with the hope that something would drive them to their houses, which was not really a possibility: The government had discontinued public transportation during the worst months in the pandemic. The roads were deserted.
When Noel Nieto and the other believer identified who they were looking for, it was late already. The other men were still waiting. Nieto then invited those who were still there to the car, and on the way back he dropped them off where they asked. During that time and from that remote corner in Havana, he heard their stories of their time in the jail, preached to them and served the ones in need.
In the capital, the LEC leader Felipe Miari wrote on social media, “The Cuban has the right to be listened to, not beaten or suppressed.” Almost at the other extreme of the island, in Puerto Padre city, Pastor Carlos López Valdés, of the same denomination, wrote, “To protest is a right, to repress is a crime.”
Help also came from the exile Christian community. The families of those arrested on July 11, Milo Espinosa and Andy Garcia Lorenzo, welcomed the religious assistance of Baptist Pastor Mario Felix Lleonart and the Adventist Pastor Alexander Pérez Rodríguez, on the internet. On Nov. 17, 2021, at least two meetings were held where the families prayed, read the Bible and received spiritual counseling.
To these sessions were added efforts by pastors “in the field,” such as Carlos Macias and Enrique de Jesús Fundora. The first, a leader of the Jovellanos Methodist Church, has maintained contact and regular visits to families of well-known opponents, participants of the July 11 protest in Matanzas province, the Lady in White Sissi Abascal, and Felix Navarro, one of the 75 who were unjustly sentenced in a crackdown on dissidents in 2003.
Macias made contact with the families who, although not believers, received periodic visits from him, and he also accompanied others whose children, grandchildren or nephews and nieces remained imprisoned for political reasons. In some cases, State Security agents coerced these persons into refusing any more assistance from the pastor.
Fundora, one of the religious leaders of the Apostolic Movement in the Mayabeque province, experienced intimidation in a direct way because of his pastoral work with relatives of the 11J prisoners. On Nov. 9, he received an official summons forcing him to appear for questioning the following day.
In the office of Investigation of Crimes Against State Security, in San Jose de las Lajas, he received fines and a warning note for “accompanying the families whose children were arrested,” said Fundora in a live Facebook interview, referring to assistance to families of those arrested and awaiting sentencing for their participation in the July 11 protests.
The religious leader noticed Captain Fernando, who “interviewed” him, visibly annoyed by his messages calling for nonviolence in the Civic March for Change, then scheduled to take place Nov. 15, 2021, in several cities on the island.
“That is why the State Security in Cuba focuses on intimidating the pastors, men of God, leaders, because in Cuba they are not after crime itself — in Cuba they are after ideals,” he said. “For this moment God has brought us here, for the freedom of our people.
“Through this medium I make an appeal for love among Cubans. For unity, for prayer, for claiming (rights and freedom), and for the Church of Christ to not stop, no matter how much intimidation comes to us, the pastors, the public faces of the church.”
“We will not stop carrying out our social work,” he added. “As a church and as pastors we don’t take sides with political parties, but we do take our position on the side of justice.”