Renewal in the Cuban Evangelical Church: The Perspective of Two Feminist Pastors

Abstract

Renewal in the Cuban Evangelical Church: The Perspective of Two Feminist Pastors Margarita M. W. Suárez The Protestant churches in Cuba are changing. They are recreating themselves in Cuba which is itself changing often moment by moment. In the early years of the revolution, religious people were often seen as counter‐revolutionary, and with the advent of Latin American Liberation Theology in the 70s and 80s, the Cuban government began to realize that one could be both religious and revolutionary. With the demise of the Soviet Union, in the early 90s, the government also realized that pragmatically an openness to religion would lead to new avenues for trade and economic assistance. In this article, the changing face of the Protestant church in Cuba will be viewed through the lens of the lives and thought of two Cuban women pastors, one Presbyterian and one Baptist. They exemplify a new feminist Christianity now seen in the church in Cuba. I met Dora Arce Valentín on my first research trip to Cuba. We arrived at the Evangelical Theological Seminary (SET) in Matanzas late on the evening of November 15, 1999. Rubén, my six‐year‐old son, was asleep and had to be carried upstairs to bed. Our room was on the second floor in the former dean's house. There was a closet and a double bed that Rubén and I would share, and a door to a rooftop space, where one could sit and overlook the harbor, read, or watch birds flying in the late afternoon catching insects. The next morning after eating breakfast with the students in the refectory, the current dean of the seminary brought us to the school where Rubén would attend first grade for the next three months. Not long after, the many challenges and rewards of my fieldwork began. Specifically, I was a virtual single mother with a chronic illness and an anthropologist of religion with limited ethnographic experience in Cuba. However, I held a deep commitment to developing a reciprocal ethnography going beyond participant observation, and I possessed a deep desire to live in Cuba and learn the deep cultural and religious histories of my people. I also knew that religion in Cuba was living in a historic moment and that working with the new feminist evangelicals would make the entire trip worthwhile. I met Presbítera Dora Arce Valantín the very next Sunday. It would be nearly ten years before I met Reverenda Raquel Suárez Rodes. Once I met Raquel, I realized that these two women's stories had multiple overlapping themes. Both of them were born of famous religious fathers (Sergio Arce Martinez and Raul Suárez Ramos, respectively), and both had grown up with the revolution, though Raquel is seven years younger than Dora. Both had had to overcome discrimination by the Marxist atheist society due to their religiosity, both chose secular careers before they decided to pursue ministry, both were divorced, and both understood their theology to be both ecumenical and feminist. There are many types of the new Christianity in Cuba, but these women are two of the faces of the new Evangelical church in Cuba. This is a form of ecumenical Protestant ministry that began to re‐emerge after forty years of religious discrimination after the Cuban revolution of 1959. It began its development during the original war for Cuba's independence in the mid‐late 1800s, grew through neo‐colonial missionary intervention in the post‐war period, survived the socio‐political transformations and counter‐revolutionary suspicions of the Cuban revolution, and has emerged into a new era of openness for religion within the republic. In its most recent stage of development, many more women are taking up positions of leadership within the churches in order to create a church whose interests in social justice both align with and sometimes critique the interests of the political sphere. Dora and Raquel are emblematic of this particular form of new Christianity that now ordains women, values their leadership, and is beginning to value a contextual Cuban feminist theology. This is the story of two women, both paradoxically daughters of pastors and daughters of the revolution...