By Paul Jeffrey
                                            - Havana, Cuba

      The taxi's motor died three times as the driver wound his way around the fallen trees and through the flooded streets of Havana. He was trying to get me back to my hotel before the worst of Hurricane Irene overcame Cuba's capital in mid-October. Each time the car stalled, I climbed out to push the decrepit Lada, a Soviet version of the most frugal Fiat, out of the deep water. And each time help appeared, anonymous volunteers who waded into the choppy waters with heads bowed against the wind to help push the Lada to dry land. Once the mission was accomplished, they disappeared with just a smile into the wet wind and flying branches.
      Having lived through Hurricane Mitch in Central America, I was fascinated by the Cuban response to Irene. Although property damage to crops and property–especially the rickety old colonial buildings in Old Havana–was significant, loss of life was minimal. Only four people died, a tribute to the organizational capacity of the Cuban people, who respond to hurricanes with the same discipline they have practiced for years in preparation for a military invasion from across the Florida Straits. And they exercise interpersonal solidarity with the same spirit that led them to send soldiers to Africa or doctors to Honduras. In the middle of a crisis, it all pays off.
      The same observation could be made about Cuban Protestants, who in recent years have grown dramatically in numbers. The island's Methodists, for example, have gone from 4,000 members five years ago to some 10,000 today, and another 4,000 people are enrolled in membership classes, according to Bishop Ricardo Pereira. The denomination's membership dropped as low as 1,600 twenty years ago. When I went to a regional Presbyterian gathering in Guines, a small town outside Havana, members showed up from new congregations that denominational officials didn't even know existed. The number of Protestant church buildings, according to the government, has doubled in the last eight years. In addition, more than 600 registered house churches are functioning, and hundreds more unregistered ones are officially tolerated. Growth is across the board, including both historical Protestants and Pentecostal churches. 
      Last June, well over 100,000 Protestants of all types gathered in Havana's Revolution Square to celebrate these years of growth. During the preceding weeks, Protestants had gone door to door throughout the island, offering personal testimony to the power of their faith. They held big rallies in towns and cities all along the island, and then gathered in Havana to show that the Pope's January 1998 Mass wasn't the only way to publicly celebrate Christian faith in Cuba. President Fidel Castro attended, the government provided transportation for the celebrants, and the ceremony–as well as three regional rallies–was broadcast on state-run television. The church-sponsored celebrations were joyful gatherings that seldom lasted over two hours. One government minister reportedly admitted that the government had a lot to learn from the church, as state-sponsored mass rallies were often interminable affairs where people “are tortured for hours with long speeches.”   
      While the state lent a hand at crucial junctures in the campaign earlier this year, it was well-organized church people who made it happen. This is important to emphasize, as it has become fashionable for outsiders to attribute the meteoric growth of Cuba's churches to purely contextual factors. In the last decade, the Cuban state went from being officially atheist to secular, the Communist Party dropped the prohibition on religious belief for members, and–at least officially–any discrimination in the work place against believers was halted by decree from above. It's clearly a seller's market in Cuba for those who want to provide meaning in one of the last holdover socialist republics. With the Soviet empire a thing of the past, the few remaining Russians are rumored to be looking for tenants who can pay in dollars to rent space in their towering embassy–shaped like a cathedral or a mosque–in the Havana suburb of Miramar. Yesterday's ideological paradigm is morally bankrupt, and the church has been quick to step into the gap.
      Furthermore, Communist Party officials today–in marked contrast to much of the first three decades of the Cuban revolution–see themselves as politicians rather than police in their relationship to religious communities. It's not an easy task for even the most skilled politician; Catholic leaders in Cuba continue to push hard for recovering private schools and other institutional trappings of legitimacy while rightist groups from the outside–like the Mormons and Moonies–pressure for permission to enter Cuba. Even with their tolerance under fire, today the attitude of party officials is much more nuanced than in the past, and even frequently cooperative.
      Yet while these are important factors in the changed religious scene in Cuba, claiming a simple cause and effect between them and packed sanctuaries is misleading. It's not the government's doing that churches have grown, it's the hard work of faithful Christians trying to live out the Gospel in modern Cuba.
      Asked why Protestant churches in Cuba are growing, Mayra Gutierrez, a high-ranking official in the Office for Religious Affairs of the Communist Party's Central Committee, responded resolutely: “The churches are doing their work and doing it well.”
      Considering the source, that's authentic praise. While Gutierrez went on to acknowledge the contribution her office has played, she was clear that it's the Protestant churches of Cuba who are responsible for their own growth.
      Signs of this can be seen all over the island. In Matanzas, for example, the Evangelical Theological Seminary–perched on a hilltop overlooking to city–is packed with new students but they're not learning old concepts. They're rethinking the Cuban church, developing pastoral styles and theological understandings that respond more adequately to their context than traditional models, which include both pre-revolutionary U.S. ecclesiastical imperialism and the post-triumph survival mode of their immediate predecessors. They're designing new liturgies, and they're working with local neighborhood groups to develop an educational program encouraging environmental hygiene. Students and faculty at the seminary are seeking to embrace what it is to be authentically Cuban and Christian in the new context. “We're weaving our Cuban culture into how we do liturgy, the hymns we sing and write, into who we are as a church,” says Ofelia Ortega, the school's rector. “We're working with the community, with civil society, in some ways we've never seen before. We're learning how to be a church that comes out from behind its walls and becomes a fully involved, fully Cuban church.”
      There are dangers along the road to church growth, however. Some church leaders warn about what they dub “numberism,” a triumphalistic focus on how many are coming to churches these days without any critical analysis of what the church is teaching its new adherents.
      “While it's true that the Christian churches all over the island are full, there's a sense of triumphalism that could lead us to be overly optimistic, to misinterpret what's happening around us,” says  Francisco Rodes, a Baptist pastor and professor of Latin American church history at the Matanzas seminary. “We need to wonder that if things go back to normal, are people going to remain in the church? While it's true that people are coming to church, it's also true that people are leaving the church. Many people who joined the churches in this decade have quit after two or three years inside the church.”
      Joel Suarez, the director of the church-sponsored Martin Luther King Center in Havana, says he worries that the rapid growth of the church during the economically difficult nineties produced a generation of  “soap Christians,” people who approached the church because it offered material resources–from soap to medicines–often not readily available in the marketplace. Such dependency, warns Suarez, will weaken the church's ability to proclaim authentic hope during uncertain times. “Are we offering cheap grace, a Gospel of Tylenol, or is the church offering an encounter with Jesus that complicates people's lives and calls for greater commitment to being the salt and light in our neighborhoods?” Suarez asks.
      The material assistance provided by the Cuban churches may become less important as the Cuban economy continues to recover. Gone are the worst times of the infamous “Special Period” when food became scarce for many. Several years of economic growth, a loosened economy, and hundreds of millions of dollars per year in family remittances pouring into the island have left Cubans better off now than in the early nineties. Where that growth is going is still anyone's guess. World prices for sugar, tobacco, and nickel–Cuba's big export items–are depressed. Foreign tourism continues to grow; the government hopes to welcome two million sunseekers from abroad next year, and the resentment against what some came to call “apartheid tourism” has abated somewhat.
      As the economic crisis of the decade continues to wane, the church will have to take the warnings of people like Rodes and Suarez seriously if it wants to be as relevant in the next millennium–and whatever political context succeeds Fidel Castro–as it has become today. People may grow as disillusioned with religious life as they became with Soviet socialism, and go looking for something–or nothing–that better meets their needs.
      The seminary at Matanzas seems a hopeful sign that the church can continue to grow to meet the challenges it faces. In addition, a renewed interest in many denominations in Christian education–serious, long-term discipling–will also help form solid believers ready to face a changing country. The growing involvement of churches in responding to social problems from AIDS to alcoholism to prostitution bodes well for a faith community that seeks to incarnate hope in the real world. And a determination to rethink ecumenism to include Pentecostals and other Christians long excluded from the ecumenical movement is also a sign that Cuban Protestants are trying to build a church that responds to their unique environment.
      For U.S. Christians, the first step in trying to understand the situation of our Protestant sisters and brothers in Cuba will always be confession for our complicity with the U.S. blockade, which has brought untold suffering to the people of Cuba. We must demand with greater vehemence that what is at best an anachronism of U.S. policy be dismantled.
      While we demand an end to the blockade, however, we must be careful not to think that renewal of direct economic and cultural ties between the two nations will offer a green light for us to again impose our own understandings of being a church on the people of Cuba. One ironic benefit of the blockade has been the Cuban churches have developed their own style of being church apart from the heavy-handed influence of U.S. mission boards and volunteer in mission groups. Reinstating the hegemony of the “mother church” would be a tragedy. Learning from our Cuban sisters and brothers would be a blessing.