Fidel Is Dead. Now What?

Calle Ocho has waited for this moment for most of my lifetime – the exuberant celebration of the death of Fidel Castro.  Cuban-Americans have waited for what seemed an eternity for the dictator’s death.  Many Cubanos died without realizing their dream.  Today Miami is more Cuban than American though the Red, White and Blue colors the sky along the fabled route through Little Havana.  This is a day that will be recalled as forcefully as the day many of these people or their family members left Cuba.

Cuban-Americans tell many stories of American arrival.  Some traveled safely and largely uneventfully to the United States before the ugliest realities of the so-called Revolution and the attendant Cuban-American Embargo began.  Many of these were more prescient than others and had the means to begin again in the neighbor to the north.  Some fled during the escalating distress of the big island of the Caribbean.  Many simply overstayed their visas to the United States, fearing a return to the communist environment they left behind.  The stories that etch themselves into our memories are typically more of the Elian Gonzales variety.  Makeshift boats drifting for days often without sufficient food and water across the shark swarming tides of the Florida Straits to touch the storied sands of South Florida.  Free born Americans cannot wrap their heads around a compulsion for freedom so profound that it drives thinking people to brave the elements for weeks knowing that the loss of family as well as life may be permanent.  Such a compulsion is created in few places but Communist Cuba is one of them.

My love for Cuba and its people is real and raw.  I have ministered in Cuba on more than one occasion.  Formerly a church I served had a partnership with a church in the Havana area.  We helped this congregation get a new building.  I have visited the Baptist seminary as well as the retired pastors home in Cuba.  I have walked their street with Cuban friends and by myself.  I love the Cuban climate, the Cuban history, the Cuban culture, the Cuban architecture, the Cuban hospitality, the Cuban food, the Cuban churches and most of all the Cuban people.  Cubanos do more with less than most people groups I know.

What I don’t love is the oppression Cubans have endured for almost six decades.  Oppressing people just because you can has been the sport of the powerful for centuries but it is never pleasant.  Something is dreadfully skewed when even mildly dissenting voices are squelched.  In the early going the unhappy were made more unhappy by brutalities like imprisonment, forced labor, torture and even death.  In more recent years the put-the-opposition-down methods have often been more measured but soul suffocating nonetheless.  No rational being can abide such unhumanitarian crimes for a skinny minute.

I have stayed in the home of a seasoned Cuban pastor apprehended on trumped up charges, ripped away from his family, incarcerated and tortured for a significant time.  I have sat in a room filled with men with similar stories.  Some have less Hollywood worthy stories of survival but virtually every Cuban family shares some ordeal as quickly as we take a breath.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.  Fidel and fellow revolutionary Che Guevara promised change.   Change came but not the variety Cubans wanted or expected.  History will show that the most idealistic of promises often cascades dramatically into an ever deepening, diseased pool of horrid realities.  More freedom becomes less freedom or no freedom.  More wealth becomes less wealth or no wealth.  More health becomes less health or no health.  Communism is a cloud without rain; a dog that won’t hunt; a mule that won’t plow; and a system that won’t succeed.  Cries for economic justice rarely if ever deliver justice in any form.

No one was better at declaring success than Fidel and few were worse at achieving it than Fidel.  Communism is a wonderful life for the few, the privileged, the Party regulars.  Everyone else lives on rice Americans wouldn’t purchase and the occasional black market purchase.  Truth is – the Soviet Union propped up Cuba with silly sugar for oil deals in the first years of the Revolution and the “hated and despised” U.S. dollar in the hands of Cubans with family here has stoked the economy over the past two decades.

I make no pretense to be an expert on Cuban-American relations.  Untangling the cords of our interesting, deadly and sometimes comical interaction back to the ramp up to the Spanish-American War is better left to the scholar or the diplomat.  I am just one guy with a love affair with Cubans here and there who prays that a new day may have dawned.  Not a day announced by normalized relations, the free sale of cigars and cheap flights to Havana but a day of genuine reform which will permit a free democratic society and most importantly a sweeping awakening on the big island.

Unnoticed by the mainstream media and even the Christian community in this country, another revolution has been occurring for some time.  Against all odds, the churches of Cuba are flourishing.  Churches so successful that a single man of God may have 30 house churches under his watch.  Churches so successful that churches report intentionally discontinuing direct evangelism because they cannot keep pace with new believers being added (and yet souls continue to be saved).  Churches so successful that members making an average of $14 a month tithe almost uniformly.  Churches so successful that despite decades of monster restrictions against mission sending collect generous missionary offerings and pray for world evangelism.

I have been convinced that an open door would present itself to American Christians for no more than five years following the death of Fidel.  Greater prosperity and fewer regulations will probably come to Cuba.  Whether they arrive swiftly or slowly; they will probably come.  When they do the “cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches” will likely begin to choke out the upward, outward progress of the Word.

Pray with me now for the lifting of oppressive policies in Cuba.  Pray with me now for the establishment of worthy leaders in Cuba.  Pray with me now for a tsunami of spiritual awakening among our near neighbor to the south.