By Rick Plasterer, Juicy Ecumenism.
A panel of Latin American human rights activists discussed the challenges to religious freedom in three Latin American countries at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, D.C. on February 5. Kristina Arriaga, formerly Executive Director of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and Vice-Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom moderated the panel.
Cuba
Mario Felix Lleonart, a Cuban human rights activist and formerly a Baptist pastor in Cuba spoke first. He said that religious freedom violations in Cuba are not often noted by the wider world, and religious freedom advocates struggle to point them out. He referred to the work of the Patmos Institute as providing greater detail, which itself professes only a limited knowledge of the religious freedom violations which occur in Cuba. Any organization functioning inside a dictatorship has a limited capacity to gather information critical of any aspect of a regime, and as the institute notes, many people may prefer to remain silent. Arrests, interrogations, and detentions of religious leaders, confiscations of properties where religious groups meet, and cancellations of religious events are indicated as typical types of harassment. Open Doors International provides a similarly dismal report from the mid-2020s.
Lleonart said that in recent years “the legal situation in Cuba has only gotten more complicated.” The Communist Party is the paramount power, according to the Cuban constitution. It contains “the Office of Religious Affairs (ORA), which also exists to repress the church in Cuba.” But in 2022 the regime created a “Department of Attention to Religious Affairs” (OAAR). Religious freedom advocates therefore demanded that the Office of Religious Affairs be removed. But this did not happen, so now two offices exist to violate religious freedom in Cuba.