How has Fidel Castro’s stance toward religion changed over the years, and why? Has his government consistently opposed religion as the “opium of the people,” in line with Marx’s famous dictum, and persecuted religious leaders and believers accordingly? Anyone interested in these intriguing and important questions will be disappointed with Margaret Short’s book.
The book includes excerpts from legal documents, from writings of Marx and Lenin, and from interviews (by journalists and theologians, not the author) on the subject of religion. It also includes excerpts from studies of Cuba by human rights groups (which, in the case of Amnesty International, Short castigates for being too “soft” on the regime). For lengthy quotes on these topics the book is of some use.
Yet while Short is correct in highlighting human rights abuses suffered by religious believers in Cuba, she fails to describe, much less explain, how and why the Cuban government’s stance toward religion has changed over the years. An important religious opening that began in the mid-1980s received considerable coverage in the official press, but gets none in her book. By the early 1990s, believers could officially become members of the Party, clergy were being elected to the National Assembly, and Christmas and Easter services were beginning to be broadcast. Any book that claims to study religion in Cuba should account for these developments. By focusing on repression and Marxism-Leninism, Short’s book has no analytical basis to do so.
The work is all the more disappointing because Short ignores the “popular religions” that are flourishing in Cuba, partly in spite of the state and partly because of growing state tolerance. Cubans from all walks of life, including government and Party bureaucrats, believe in Afro-Cuban syncretic religions perhaps more than in Marxism-Leninism. For some, these creeds serve as “cultures of resistance,” which, given the author’s hostility toward the regime, should be central to her study. Short does not even draw on the works of other critics of the revolution that are relevant here (such as those of Andres Oppenheimer and Georgie Anne Geyer), much less go beyond previously published works. Cubans also are turning increasingly to evangelical Protestant sects; though Short mentions this in passing, she offers no explanation for these groups’ growing strength.
The book, in sum, provides only a partial depiction of Cuban religious reality, and probably its least important aspect in the 1990s. Short’s personal politics have blinded her to considerations other than Marxism-Leninism that may have guided the Cuban government’s stance toward religion. She therefore provides the reader no basis for understanding, furthermore, how the role of religion has differed between Cuba and Eastern European Communist regimes, differences that might help explain why Castro’s government has survived, against all odds, the domino collapse of Communism elsewhere in the Soviet bloc.
