planted across the Communist island despite reports of unprecedented persecution of Christians, including several cases of torture, BosNewsLife established Saturday, November 5.
Christian Aid Mission (CAM), a group supporting native missionaries in Cuba, said that "through one indigenous ministry alone, 4500 people were led to Christ [since] last year and 260 cell churches were planted."
News of the alleged evangelical revival came as a prominent blind Christian lawyer and activist in Cuba, Juan Carlos Gonzalez Leiva, warned he had "no memory, during my forty years of life of witnessing the brutality we are currently experiencing," especially towards Christian dissidents like himself.
Gonzalez Leiva, who currently lives under house arrest after years of imprisonment, said he established that Alfredo Dominguez Batista, one of the prisoners of conscience of 75 recently detained dissidents "and a profound Christian" was "coerced by the prevailing violence of the military personnel at the Provincial Prison of Holguin, to nail his hand on to the wood wall of his cell on October 17, 2005."
Also last month "on October 14, 2005, in the city of Santa Clara, 800 paramilitary groups carrying sticks, metal rods, and other weapons attacked thirty-one peaceful dissidents," seriously injuring several demonstrators, he claimed.
PSYCHOTROPIC ANTIDEPRESSANTS
In addition "the deliberate distribution of large amounts of psychotropic antidepressants led
the lawyer and prisoner of what is known as the ‘Group of the 75’ [dissidents], Mario Enrique Mayo, to attempt suicide twice, in the past weeks, in the Prison of Kilo 7 in Camaguey," he said. The prisoner used "a blade to carve on his skin, including his face, including signs that read "I am innocent" and "Freedom"."
Gonzalez Leiva added that "thirty prison guards dealt a horrendous beating to 34-year old political prisoner, Virgilio Mantilla Arango," in the Kilo 9 prison of the same region. "His face was smashed…[and] he suffered a fractured shoulder bone and [injuries] all over his body, as well as a foot laceration," he added.
In other incidents of torture penal authorities allegedly exposed death-row detainee, Hector Santana Vega, "an invalid prisoner, whose access to a wheel chair has been denied," to three mock executions in the yard of the maximum-security Prison Kilo 8 in Camaguey in the last few months," Gonzalez Leiva stressed.
"IRRATIONAL POLITICS"
"The Cuban government’s irrational politics has lost track of its own laws and is penetrating into the dangerous realm of crime and barbarity," he said.
Gonzalez Leiva, 40, has been living under house arrest following his release from prison where he served over two years on what human rights groups described as "trumped up charges" of "disorderly conduct, disrespect for authority, disobedience and resisting arrest."
He and nine other were arrested on March 4, 2002, after staging a protest at the Antonio Luaces Iraola provincial hospital, about 250 miles (400 kilometers) east of Havana, where independent journalist Jesus Alvarez Castillo was reportedly being treated for injuries from a confrontation with police.
"Our country has turned into a hell for all dissidents and political prisoners. A letter cannot begin to reflect our dismal reality," Gonzalez Leiva stressed.
LONG SENTENCES
Of the 75 Cuban citizens rounded up in March 2003, 61 remain confined to squalid prison conditions, serving sentences averaging 20 years, according to human rights advocacy group Freedom House. It welcomed the European Parliament’s decision last week to award Cuban activists its annual Sakharov Prize, but it also urged the European Union to do more to "hold the Cuban government accountable for its ongoing human rights abuses."
The award, named for renowned Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, was given to "Cuba’s Ladies in White" or ‘Damas de Blanco’, a group of women who regularly demonstrate peacefully in Cuba on behalf of relatives jailed over two years ago during a widespread crackdown on Cuban dissidents and independent journalists.
Reports of violence against especially Christian dissidents came after Cuba’s Communist government threatened to demolish house churches after authorities recently outlawed most of them. "Many house churches have had equipment such as pews, homemade benches, musical instruments, Christian literature and anything else confiscated by police," said advocacy group Voice Of the Martyrs, which has close contacts with persecuted Christians in Cuba.
NEW MEASURES
Under the new measures, services that have not been "authorized" are reportedly banned, while only one house church of any denomination can exist within two kilometers (1.25 miles) of each other. Foreigners cannot attend house churches in mountainous areas and require permission to attend them elsewhere. Violations will lead to the closure of the church and fines of up to $1,000, said human rights group Forum 18 recently in an investigation.
There is apparently concern among Communist officials over Protestant church attendance which has roughly tripled since 1989 to 300,000 people, with an additional 100,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses, according to church estimates. Catholic attendance is estimated around 150,000. Many Christians gather in unofficial house churches as their congregations have been denied permission to operate, church leaders and human rights groups say.
"They [the government] teach atheism to children in school. Church is truly the only place where people can hear an alternative," said a CAM missionary. (With BosNewsLife Research, BosNewsLife News Center and reports and information from Cuba and the United States).
