Cuba makes new restrictions on home churches

Posted on Sat, Mar. 18, 2006

Cuba makes new restrictions on home churches

ALEXANDRA ALTER AND FRANCES ROBLES
Knight Ridder Newspapers

MIAMI - Responding to the growth of evangelical Christianity in Cuba,
Fidel Castro's government issued new measures regulating worship in home
churches, or casas culto, as the formerly illegal practice continues to
spread.

Some Cuban pastors say the measures are similar to U.S. zoning
regulations, designed to impose rules on fast-growing evangelical
congregations.

"If anything, it demonstrates the growth of churches in Cuba," said
Pastor Elmer Lavastida of the Segunda Iglesia Bautista El Salvador in
the eastern city of Santiago. "It's simply a movement with large
proportions that has to be legalized."

But the measures worry other pastors and church activists, who see them
as another way for the communist government - officially atheist until
1992 - to curb religious freedom.

Three casas culto in central and eastern Cuba were closed by the
government late last year for failing to meet the new regulations,
according to the Evangelical Christian Humanitarian Outreach (Echo
Cuba), a Miami organization that conducts humanitarian missions through
churches in Cuba.

"The Cuban government is afraid the church can create a kind of social
movement," said Omar Lopez Montenegro, head of the Miami-based Cuban
American National Foundation's committee for human rights.

Pentecostals and other Protestant evangelicals make up the fastest
growing group, and Cuban churches have scarcely been able to keep up.
According to the evangelical publication Operation World, evangelical
Christianity in Cuba is growing by about 6.5 percent per year. Yet the
number of official Protestant church buildings has remained at around 1,000.

As a result, the faithful have spilled over into an estimated 15,000 to
20,000 home churches.

Igor Alonso, a pastor at the Flamingo Road Church in Doral, Fla., who
has been on 10 church missions to Cuba, said he once attended a Baptist
service in the port town of Mariel in which 40 people squeezed into a
one-bedroom apartment.

"It's typical for a church of 200 people to have 15 to 20 home churches"
he said. "That's what they know as their church."

But the growth also has made the government nervous.

"The government is a bit thrown off by this phenomenon," said one church
expert in Cuba who asked that his name be withheld for fear of
government reprisals. "It's growing, and they don't know what to do with
it."

http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local/14126276.htm