Religious Left activists, after nearly 40 years of silence, are finally speaking up about "religious freedom" in communist Cuba!But their "religious freedom" concerns are focused exclusively on U.S. restrictions against their own junkets to Cuba.
A delegation of leftwing church officials converged on Capitol Hill to lobby for a removal of all limits on travel to Cuba. The activists posed for a smiling photo with Congressman Charles Rangel of New York, who is proposing the travel ban removal.
A letter to members of Congress from 13 denominations and Religious Left groups complained, with no sense of irony, that U.S. travel restrictions on Cuba ""are unfair and inappropriate, restrain religious freedom and reflect undue governmental interference in the exercise of religion."
For this crowd, religious liberty is only an important issue when it impinges on their own self-important activity. John McCullough, who heads Church World Service, which is the relief arm of the National Council of Churches, complained that U.S. travel policies on Cuba "have inconsistently limited religious travel by the broader church organizations, while readily approving more frequent visits by individual church congregations."
In the two years before the new 2005 restrictions on travel to Cuba began, the National Council of Churches (NCC) sent 33 delegations to Cuba. Now, the NCC is only to four trips per year to Cuba. If anything, sparing Cuban Christians the torment of dozens of NCC visits would seem to be an argument in favor of U.S. travel limits!
But the Religious Left argues that the restrictions harm fellow Christians in Cuba.
"The church is on fire for the Lord in Cuba," said Jerald McKie of the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries, according to a Church World Service news release. "It is filled with young people lined up and packing house churches and storefront churches. We need to be able to walk with these people and to nurture that spirit as their partners in faith."
It is indeed true that Christianity, despite 50 years of communist persecution, is now thriving in Cuba. There are believed to be over 4 million Roman Catholic in Cuba, and between 500,000 and 2 million evangelical Christians. But this is no thanks to left-leaning denominational officials in the U.S., who spent most of the 1970's and 1980's hailing Fidel Castro's Cuba as the logical outcome of Liberation Theology.
The Religious Left, then as now, prizes economic "justice" over freedom of conscience. That Cuba's communist masters harassed, jailed and sometimes murdered Christian leaders did not upset the Religious Left. After all, Castro provided health care and literacy for his people, while also supporting "liberation" throughout the developing world.
Liberation Theology is now largely dead, thankfully. But charismatic Christianity, among both Catholics and Protestants, is sweeping the developing world.
Cuba, despite its restrictions against religious practice, has not been immune from the global revival. Today, there are reportedly only 1,000 Protestant official church buildings in Cuba, the same number as in 1959. Hundreds of thousands of Christian converts, unable to squeeze into old sanctuaries, instead are flocking to house churches, which may number between 10,000 to 15,000.
Responding to the surge in non-government recognized Christianity, the Cuban government instituted tight restrictions against houses churches in 2005.
There are no news releases on visits to Capitol Hill by Religious Left officials on behalf of Cuba's sometimes besieged houses churches. Instead, they are concerned only about their own travel inconveniences.
"We believe (the restrictions) are unfair and inappropriate, restrain religious freedom and reflect undue governmental interference in the exercise of religion," read a June 13 letter from Religious Left officials representing the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Church of Christ, the American Baptist Church, Church World Service, and the infamous Washington Office on Latin America, a chief enthusiast for Leftist "liberation" movements in the 1980's.
In April, Cuba's Methodist bishop, Pereira Diaz, addressed the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries, at its directors meeting in Stamford, Connecticut.
According to United Methodist News Service, he recalled that after the 1959 communist take-over, the government occupied churches and shut down the church's social work.
The church suffered from "a lack of understanding by the government of what we were about," the bishop euphemistically said of the communist regime's persecution. Methodism declined to 500 members in Cuba, but now is back up to 18,000 members."With the fall of the Berlin Wall, our whole situation has changed," the bishop explained, somewhat cryptically, about the cut-off of Soviet subsidies for Castro's controlled economy.
Cuba was once considered "a medical powerhouse" but now lacks basic medicines. "There are some doctors who have left their clinics and are working as cleaning people in a hotel to have enough to live on," he said.
The bishop, in his public speech, naturally felt compelled to criticize U.S. sanctions against Cuba, rather than the innate failures of communism. But he can be forgiven. He is responsible for the safety of his churches and parishioners, who suffer under a regime that remains hostile to religion.
Less forgivable is the Religious Left's self-absorbed indifference to the actual plight of Cuban Christians and the real cause of their sufferings.
Will the same church groups that demand easier travel for themselves to Cuba ever speak equally as forcefully for human rights and full religious freedom in Cuba?
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