By Mark Johnson. The
Charlotte Observer.. Posted at 12:45 a.m. EST Wednesday, December 13, 2000
HAVANA -- In the 90-year-old working class neighborhood of Pogoloti, a
visitor is as likely to run into a North Carolinian at the local Baptist church
as at the famed Tropicana Club a few blocks away.
At a busy intersection in Cuba's capital sits Ebenezer Baptist Church. The
church and the adjoining Martin Luther King Center operate as a hub for a
growing contingent of Carolinas Baptists whose congregations have formed
partnerships with Baptist churches throughout Cuba.
"The idea in the United States is that there are no churches in Cuba,
that Fidel Castro killed religion. That's the (U.S. Sen.) Jesse Helms image"
of Cuba, said the Rev. Raul Suarez Ramos, pastor at Ebenezer and a
representative in the Cuban National Assembly. "When the few people from
the United States come to Cuba, they find a totally different reality."
Shortly after seizing power in 1959, Castro bolted church doors, seized
religious property and embraced atheism. In 1961, a Catholic bishop and 130
clergymen were put on a boat and exiled. For decades, church members were
harassed and attendance at religious services shriveled as Cuban schools taught
generations of students that religion was a trivial abstraction to the
revolution.
Since the elimination of formal restrictions against religious worship in
1992, the Cuban government has taken modest steps toward creating a more
religion-friendly environment, and Carolinians now visit regularly.
Ben Griffith of Huntersville began visiting Cuban Baptist churches in 1992
with fellow members of Lake Norman Baptist Church.
"There seems to be more of an openness from the Cuban government to
encourage this," Griffith, a home-interior supply retailer, said in a
recent interview. "The government has recognized the church. You saw that
when the pope visited Cuba. There's more freedom to worship. I've seen quite a
revival in Cuba for the churches. That doesn't mean it's easy to be a Christian."
Griffith's church has paired with another Ebenezer Baptist Church, in the
Havana suburb of Yaguajay. Like Ramos' church, Ebenezer took the name of King's
Atlanta church out of admiration for his politics of social justice. Griffith's
first visits were like orchestrating a mini-revival - lots of preaching and
singing. Now such missions resemble a home-repair SWAT team as Griffith and
others sweep in to help build an addition at Ebenezer or work on a parishioner's
house.
Ramos' church, with a dormitory, big kitchen and meeting space, often serves
as a nerve center for coordinating missions from the United States.
Ned Walsh, a Raleigh-based consultant on Cuba and former Baptist minister,
once packed a money belt with $10,000 from Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in
Raleigh to take to its partner church in Matanzas.
When the Rev. Max Hill of First Baptist Church in Jonesville leads his
members' trips to their partner church, El Jordan Baptist in the Guanabacoa
section of Havana, they load up on over-the-counter medicines. Cold pills, pain
relievers and especially asthma medicines are scarce.
"The churches in Cuba are growing across the denominational spectrum,"
Hill, who is making his 12th trip next month, said in a recent interview. "(After)
the fall of the Eastern bloc, which the Cubans refer to as `the disaster in
Eastern Europe,' it just became necessary to open that society."
The Cuban government officially recognized Christmas again in 1997, just
prior to Pope John PaulII's visit. The holiday disappeared in 1969 because
Castro said it interfered with the sugar harvest. In December 1998, a Catholic
cardinal offered Christmas wishes over government-controlled radio. The
following spring, Cuban churches held their largest national public celebration,
the Cuban Evangelical Celebration, at the Plaza of the Revolution.
While the major faiths and Christian denominations, including Presbyterians
and Methodists, all have expanded their ties to Cuba, Baptists have been
particularly aggressive about it. They may also gain attention because of the
incongruity, however stereotyped, of a Baptist church with its conservative
roots thriving under a communist regime.
The Southern Baptist Alliance, a more liberal, 130-church spinoff from the
Southern Baptist Convention, has partly driven the growing relationship between
the Carolinas and Cuba. Nearly half of the alliance's members are in North
Carolina, and at least six churches in the Carolinas have established Cuban
partners, according to Stan Hastey, the alliance's executive director.
"What really hooked us was learning in all these people-to-people
contacts how a group of Christians in difficult circumstances not only survive,
but make the most of it," Hastey said in an interview last week. "What
we have tapped in to there is an understanding of what it means to endure
suffering and to do it with joy. I know that's what hooked me."
Sue Poss, a deacon with First Baptist Church in Greenville, S.C., has
visited at least 30 Cuban congregations since 1995, from a large, established
congregation in Havana with pews and a piano, to the porch of a countryside home
where she preached by a porch light powered by a car battery. She said the
strength of Cuban churches may be surprising but is logical given Cubans' need
for something to hold on to, some reassurance that they are not alone in
struggling against trying circumstances.
"They do church with very little resources," Poss said. In
Greenville, if "we need Sunday school literature, we order it. We need
Bibles, we go to the store and buy them. They do without any of that."
The Carolinians show up with their money, medicine and tools. In return,
they said they get a recharging of their faith. Ramos, a non-communist whose
church has 17 communist members and has played host to Castro more than once,
agreed that his guests learn from seeing faith maintained in a totally different
context.
"An American woman the other day was telling me what Christmas was in
the United States, a big opportunity for business," Ramos said. "We
don't have that problem in Cuba. We celebrate the very fact of Christmas, the
entrance of God into the lives of human beings. (Church) is not the place where
you go on Sunday. It's the community of believers. We take care of each other.
Religion is not a product."
Reach Mark Johnson at (704) 358-5941 or mjohnson@charlotteobserver.com | 