Father Alberto Reyes, a priest of the Archdiocese of Camagüey in Cuba, said that government officials phone and threaten Church members who speak out against injustice.
The priest told ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, that religious freedom on the island should include participation in public life in areas like education, health care, and free speech.
The World Religious Freedom Report 2023, presented by Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) on June 22, states that in Cuba, “it can be said that freedom of worship is generally respected, but one cannot speak of full religious freedom” because “the control of the state and the Communist Party over religion, as well as over the rest of the aspects of the life of citizens, limits, restricts, and regulates to the extreme many of their actions and movements.”
“Although there was some hope for reforms in Cuba,” the ACN report states, “the changes in the constitution in 2019 and in the penal code in 2022 raise fears that the situation will not improve in the near future. Both laws promote society’s subjection to a Marxist party’s socialist system.”
Reyes told ACI Prensa that Cuba’s “totalitarian government” seeks absolute control and needs to “have the control over the Church: what is allowed, what is not allowed, according to their own interests.”
The Church in Cuba has no access to the media, education, or health care, yet it can hold Masses. Processions and public Masses require “the conditions that they want to give.”
“For instance, I’ve been authorized to hold a procession, but with their route, not mine as the pastor. Cuba doesn’t allow religion. “Mass can be held, churches are open, but everything else is lacking,” Reyes remarked.
Reyes further noted that the dictatorship hinders church reconstruction and “many times they don’t even approve it,” even though new churches have been allowed “after very long processes.”
He noted that the government doesn’t allow the Church into social life’s off-limits rather than putting up barriers.
Priest threats
“If we also consider the prophetic mission of the Church as part of religious freedom,” Reyes said, “there are continuous obstacles, because priests [and] men and women religious who have raised our voices have been harassed, publicly confronted by government partisans, and we have been summoned to State Security. It’s been busy.”
Reyes told ACI Prensa, “We have been threatened with being prosecuted and imprisoned if we continue to publish our opinion on the situation in the country in the media when it doesn’t agree with the government’s official version.
The priest of the Archdiocese of Camagüey explained that communist officials “continually complain to the bishops and religious superiors so that they are the ones who take measures against us, so that they are the ones who silence us and then they [the officials] have clean hands.”
“He is the bull’s eye at which all the displeasure this people has can be directed,” Reyes said of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Religious freedom is decided above him. “The Office of Religious Affairs, directed by Caridad Diego, has controlled the Church for more than 30 years and decides all this iron control that there is over the Church,” he said.
Reyes noted that Díaz-Canel follows orders, not makes them.
The priest also discusses Cuban life on Facebook.
