22 July 2024 marked two years since the Cuban Family Code was approved by the National Assembly, and, just as CSW warned, the legislation has extended far beyond equality for the LGBT+ community. Although this aspect was the focus of the government’s efforts to encourage a ‘yes’ vote in the public referendum that followed, only a handful of the 474 articles were relevant to that subject.
Implementation of the legislation has pressured entire families into emigrating, to protect their children and not lose parental custody as is a real possibility under Article 191 of the code. The legislation allows for minors to be transferred into the care of the state, if the parents fail to fulfil the responsibilities detailed in Article 138 of the code including ‘inculcating love for the family, for the homeland, respect for its symbols… the norms of social coexistence [based on the ideology of the Cuban Communist Party] and respect for the authorities’. Parents are at risk if they demonstrate behaviour that ‘induces their daughter or son to commit a criminal act…’ (191 (c)) and/or ‘[are responsible for] vicious, corrupt or criminal conduct that is incompatible with the proper exercise of parental responsibility…’ (151 (e)).
At first glance the code may appear harmless, however, it is necessary to understand that all the concepts of homeland, family, respect for patriot symbols, criminal act, and vicious or corrupt conduct are interpreted within the framework of the socialist system on which the 2019 constitution is founded. However, continuing protests, such as that of 11 July 2021 and other smaller scale social uprisings since then,1 indicate that the population is rejecting the system that the constitution obligates Cuban citizens to defend, even with their life.2
‘Any pastor or religious leader can be charged with these and other crimes. Those whose churches are not registered or approved by the state are catalogued as places where a rejection of the socialist system is taught, not just to parents, but to their children attending Sunday services. Pastors teach parents of families to put their love for God above any political system, even above the socialist system, and the regime does not like this,’ a Havana pastor told CSW. He added that the Family Code has caused pastors to refrain from filing complaints reporting on the abuse that many of their children experience at school, out of fear that they will be attacked and ultimately lose custody of their children.
Some religious leaders who have emigrated with their families just to avoid this tragedy. One public example is mentioned by Yoel Suarez in Sickle and Cross, his book currently in the process of publication. He tells us that in March 2023, the military formally accused Ms Marisol Peña Cobas of ‘other acts against the normal development of the minor’. According to the authorities, the woman failed to instruct her daughter to respect and love former leaders Fidel and Raul Castro and current president Miguel Díaz-Canel. One month later, her daughter, seven-year-old Katherin Acosta, was summoned by the National Revolutionary Police to the Camagüey Provincial Office of Children’s Care in retaliation for her mother’s activism. They invoked the Family Code and threatened to remove the ‘parental responsibility’ of Ms Peña Cobas and her husband. In June of that same year, the harassment of and threats against the family intensified, and the authorities warned the family to leave Cuba. The family sold their belongings to purchase flights to Nicaragua, then, fearful that they would be victims of ‘coyotes’3 or human traffickers, they made their way, on their own, through Central America to finally reach the US border.
In her defence, Ms Peña Cobas said: ‘God is supreme and does not compel any human being to worship him, because he gave us free will. No man on Earth has the right or power to compel other human beings to love and respect him, unless they are worthy of the love and the respect they demand.’
Another case is that of Reverend Arcadis Solano Silvera, pastor of the Fourth Baptist Church of Santiago de Cuba. He had endured the relentless harassment targeting him, his family, and his church for more than 20 years, but in 2022 the government’s tactics changed. In one of his last obligatory ‘interviews’ with his government assigned Department of State Security (DSE) agent, who went by ‘Anais’, she mentioned the possibility of sending his eldest son, who was only 15 years old at the time, to perform his compulsory military service (SMO). She referred to article 6 of the Family Code which states that ‘Girls, boys and adolescents may not be separated from their mothers, parents and family unless determined by the competent authorities in special circumstances’.
On the morning of 2 March 2023, while the pastor and his wife were out of the house, a woman arrived at his home. She did not identify herself by name, but said she represented Military Care Area office of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) and claimed that she was there to request information on Pastor Solano Silvera’s son, Daniel Arcadis Solano Jaume. The pastor’s 13-year-old daughter answered the door and, even though her brother was at home, she maintained the presence of mind to inform the officer that because she was underage, she was not allowed to open the door, nor to provide information about her family. The officer did not hide her irritation and told the pastor’s daughter that she was there to take Daniel immediately for his SMO, ordinarily imposed on young men from the age of 17.
The officer repeatedly pushed the 13-year-old to tell her where Daniel was, but she stood firm, responding to each demand that she was an underage minor. The officer became infuriated and shouted at the girl, ‘Your brother belongs to me, give me the information, don’t refuse!’ Once again, the girl shook her head. After the officer left, the girl immediately informed her parents of what had happened, and the pastor and his family made and carried out plans to leave the country within days of the incident.
For pastors and lay people who remain on the island, the arbitrary application of the Family Code in any area of their lives remains a constant threat. Since October 2023, Raciel Vega Matos, pastor of the Baptist Christian Family Church of Cerro y Primelles in Havana, has reported, on numerous occasions to CSW, the harassment experienced by his five-year-old daughter, Ruth, at the hands of her preschool teachers and directors. They have targeted the little girl for bringing her Bible to the school and singing Christian songs during recess, and especially for not wanting to participate in celebrations around Halloween, school plays celebrating the Revolution, and refusing to swear allegiance to Cuban communism, which includes the recitation of the phrase, ‘with the guidance of Fidel, for the homeland and socialism, Moncadists4 always ready, pioneers for communism we will be like the Che’.
As punishment, the little girl’s chair was moved several yards away from her classmates, who were forbidden to speak to her. Over a period of months, Ruth developed several psychological disorders and a kind of school phobia that forced her parents to pull her out on 5 March 2024 and educate her at home. More threats followed swiftly thereafter, as homeschooling is not allowed in Cuba. The pastor was threatened with the loss of custody of his daughter, based on the Family Code. On 23 July 2024, Pastor Vega and his family fled the country in order to avoid further retaliation and trauma to his daughter, who continues to suffer from emotional disorders stemming from the abuse she suffered at school.
The Family Code and freedom of thought and conscience
In October 2023, a pastor in Mayabeque Province was visited in her home by the provincial president of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC),5 and a DSE agent who told the pastor that they were reliably informed that she was ‘poisoning and polluting the minds’ of women in the city, by sharing concepts and principles that degrade women and that were not supported by the Family Code. They had clearly received information on the content of her preaching and teaching from an informant as they mentioned specific theological positions she had espoused. They particularly attacked her for allegedly saying that the FMC does not represent all women in Cuba.
The pastor responded that her preaching and teaching was based on her understanding of God’s word and her faith, and she denied very saying that women in the FMC cannot be Christians or that FMC members cannot attend church. However, she affirmed that she did believe that ‘anything that contradicts the principles of faith does not represent the Christian woman…’
The DSE agent warned the pastor that if she carried on holding meetings of this nature, they would take action not only against her but also against her husband, who could be fired from his job. She was told she had two choices, continue on in her counterrevolutionary ways, or look after her husband’s employment. The pastor responded that she and her family are Christians and would continue to serve the Lord, and if this meant her husband would lose his job, so be it.
In another case involving freedom of thought and conscience, a pastor, his wife, and their teenage child were summoned in June 2024 to an interview with a group of DSE officers. This followed a long campaign of harassment targeting the family because the teenager has refused to venerate patriotic symbols and participate in political events at school, and expressed disagreement with various class topics that they believe contradict their faith. The DSE officers told the parents that the teachers had ‘exhausted all legal means’ to force the teenager to align their thought with revolutionary teaching and concluded that the parents had incited their child’s behaviour.
The parents were issued an Acta de Advertencia – a kind of pre-arrest warrant justifying future criminal charges for acts yet to take place – which stated, ‘if [the parents] persist in this, we will take action not just to remove their eldest [child from the home], but also any other young children; and, in accordance with the new laws of the Family Code of our country, they will lose the right to continue educating them, will have their parental power removed, and we, as the state, will be responsible for educating, correcting, teaching, and providing them with a healthy education.’
The pastor, who was taken aback by the officers’ threats, nevertheless replied that, even if the threats were carried out, the family would continue to teach their children from the point of view of the faith he has chosen to believe and live out.
Nothing new under the sun
In the opinion of Cuban lawyer in exile Ariandys Aguiar, a pastor affiliated with the Baptist Convention of Eastern Cuba for almost 20 years, the evil that the adoption of the new Family Code would unleash against the dissident population in the country has always been present. ‘In a system like that in Cuba’, Pastor Aguiar told CSW, ‘what is not yours cannot be taken away. Children in Cuba do not belong to their parents.’
He stated that in Cuba, as a pastor, he constantly feared for the safety of his children because the intensity of the indoctrination in schools, universities, and in the military service has always been significant. ‘But all of a sudden in 2022,’ he said, ‘we found that the detonator of so much evil would be made manifest openly as a law, disguised as progressive, to keep freedom of religion and expression restricted.’
By CSW’s Cuba Desk
- The Cuban Conflict Observatory (OCC) recorded 671 protests and public complaints on the island in June 2024, showing a growing curve compared to 626 in January of the same year.
- According to the Constitution of Cuba, the defense of the socialist homeland mandates that every citizen to fight by any means, including armed struggle, when no other remedy is possible, against anyone who tries to overthrow the political, social and economic order.
- Coyote is a term used to describe paid ‘guides’ who escort migrants to the US border and direct them on how to enter with the highest likelihood of success.
- ‘Moncadist’ refers to the failed Fidel Castro-led 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks which he considered to have set the Cuban Revolution in motion.
- The FMC has existed in Cuba since 1948, but was reorganised in 1960 by Vilma Espin, the wife of Raul Castro Ruz. It operates in cooperation with the Cuban government and the Cuban Communist Party.