Religion in Cuba

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El Cobre Basilica

The dominant religions in Cuba are Afro-Cuban cults - especially the syncretistic Santería - as well as the Christianity of the Roman Catholic Church and numerous Protestant denominations. After long religion as incompatible with the 1961 by revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on state ideology declared Marxism-Leninism was considered that since 1992 religious freedom in the Cuban Constitution anchored.

history

Before the Europeans opened up Cuba, the mythology of the Cuban Taíno was very similar to the mythology of the rest of the Caribbean, especially the Maya. The supreme deity of the polytheistic Taíno is the god Yucahu. Other deities worshiped by the Taíno are Huracán , the god of storms and Baibrama, the god of fertility.

With the conquest of Cuba by the Spaniards, Christian, especially Catholic, ideas found their way into the mythical world of Cuba. From the 16th century, priests were trained in Havana. The clerical class quickly had high authority. During the wars of independence, the Catholic Church stood firmly on the side of the colonial power Spain and later on in the republic limited its effect mainly to the urban middle and upper classes. Only a minority of the clergy were Cubans before the revolution.

As a syncretistic religion, with the catholization of Cuba and the importation of slaves, the Santería emerged. Saints from the Catholic tradition were assigned to the respective deities of the Yoruba religion (" Orishas "), which was imported from Africa but was forbidden by the Spanish Catholic rule as a pagan religion , whose open worship was tolerated by the slaves. Since the Santería does not claim to be absolute and assumes a unity of the Catholic saints with their gods, some of their followers also attend Catholic services and are baptized as Christian. The Catholic Church, however, rejects the Santeria and the practices associated with it completely.

Protestant churches emerged primarily through the influence of missionaries who came to Cuba since the US occupation of Cuba in 1898–1902. By the 1959 revolution, they were already strongly anchored, especially among the black rural population. In contrast to the Roman Catholic Church, the leading representatives of the Protestant churches were never in political opposition to the leadership of the revolution.

Although Cuban society was one of the most secular societies in Latin America even before the revolution , it was fundamentally Christian-oriented, which contributed to a religiously justified negative reaction to the revolution when it assumed a pro-communist character. One million Cubans attended Catholic Day in Havana in November 1959, while the event had only attracted around 10,000 people in previous years.

present

Although religious freedom has constitutional status, religious communities are subject to various forms of state control. You may only legally operate after you have completed registration in the company register of the Ministry of Justice, whereby there is neither a right to registration nor the criteria applied are public. The use of buildings, vehicles and bank accounts, or the receipt of visits, printed matter and donations from partner communities from abroad and many other activities are all subject to approval, whereby the government can reward good behavior and sanction criticism. The coordination of relations between religious communities and the state is the responsibility of the Office for Religious Affairs set up in 1985 at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba.

In its 2014 annual report, the international human rights organization Human Rights Watch described the state's obstruction to religious freedom as “still substantial” despite the Catholic Church's growing role in civil society.

There are widely differing figures on the current distribution of religions within Cuba. While one statistic speaks of up to 39% Catholics, other estimates assume that only 15% of Cubans are firmly assigned to a denomination. According to church information, 4.7 million of Cuba's 11 million inhabitants are baptized. Only 150,000 Cubans attend Catholic services more or less regularly. Since the revolution in 1959, the proportion of Protestant believers has risen to between five and ten percent today. Other religious minorities are the Jews , of whom around 1,000 live on the island, as well as around 3,500 Muslims . There have been supporters of the Rastafarian movement in Cuba since the late 1970s .

In Cuba there are currently two statutory religious holidays per year: Christmas Day on December 25th and Good Friday. It was reintroduced by the leadership of the revolution, which it had initially abolished, on the occasion of the papal visits in 1998 and 2012.

literature

  • Claudia Rauhut: The Santería religion and the communist party and government policy in Cuba. in: Yearbook for Historical Communism Research 2009 , edited by Ulrich Mählert and others ( available online )
  • Katrin Hansing: Rasta, Race and Revolution: The Emergence and Development of the Rastafari Movement in Socialist Cuba. LIT, Münster 2006, ISBN 978-3-8258-9600-3 (English)

Web links

  • Church in Need : Cuba ( Memento of July 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF), country report with a focus on the Catholic Church
  • Christian Solidarity Worldwide: Religious Freedom in Cuba, summary of the country report from April 1, 2013 available there
  • Nota de respuesta de Cuba ... Statement from Cuba to the UNHCR on the subject of religious minorities, website of the Cuban Foreign Ministry of June 1, 2013 (Spanish)
  • Cuba, Country Chapter on Cuba in the US State Department's Report on International Religious Freedom of May 20, 2013
  • United States Commission on International Religious Freedom: Cuba (PDF), Country Report 2014 (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Jens Sobisch: Cuba (=  culture shock ). 5th updated edition. Reise Know-How Verlag Peter Rump GmbH , Osnabrück 2012, ISBN 978-3-8317-1270-0 .
  2. ↑ Michael Zeuske: Cuba in the 21st century . 1st edition. Rotbuch Verlag , Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86789-151-6 , pp. 60-84 .
  3. ↑ Michael Zeuske: Brief history of Cubas . 3rd, revised and updated edition. Verlag CH Beck , Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-49422-2 , p. 244 .
  4. ^ A b Bert Hoffmann: Cuba . 3rd, revised edition. Verlag CH Beck , Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-55851-1 , p. 151-161 .
  5. ↑ Carlos Widmann: Fidel at the heavenly door . The mirror. November 25, 1996. Archived from the original on June 8, 2014. Retrieved June 8, 2014.
  6. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church KKK 2116 + 2117 KKK 2116 : “All forms of 'fortune-telling' are to be rejected: the servitude of Satan and demons, necromancy or other acts that are wrongly assumed to 'unveil' the future [cf. . Dtn 18.10; Jer 29: 8]. Behind horoscopes , astrology , palmistry , interpreting omens and oracles, clairvoyance and questioning a medium hides the will to power over time, history and ultimately people, as well as the desire to incline the secret powers. This contradicts the respect filled with loving awe that we alone owe God. " KKK 2117 :" All practices of ' magic ' and sorcery with which one wants to subjugate secret powers in order to put them at one's service and a supernatural power To win over others - be it also to bring them health - seriously violates the virtue of worship. Such acts are even more condemnable if they are accompanied by the intention to harm others or if they attempt to attract demons. Wearing amulets is also reprehensible. Spiritism is often associated with divination or magic. That is why the Church warns believers against it. The use of so-called natural healing powers neither justifies invoking evil forces nor exploiting the good faith of others. "

  7. ↑ Antoni Kapcia: Cuba in Revolution: A History since the Fifties. Response, London 2008, p. 147
  8. ↑ Margaret E. Crahan: Salvation through Christ or Marx: Religion in Revolutionary Cuba p. 179, in: Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs Vol. 21 No. 1, February 1979, pp. 156-184, accessed June 14 2014 (english)
  9. ↑ Crahan: Christ or Marx , p. 161.
  10. ↑ Human Rights Watch: Cuba, country chapter in the 2014 annual report Freedom in the World , accessed June 10, 2014.
  11. ↑ Berlin Bishop Dröge travels to Cuba - discussions also with Cardinal Ortega, ( Memento from July 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) EPD report of April 3, 2012, accessed on June 9, 2014
  12. ^ Cuba: First mosque by 2015 ( Memento from July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) , Vatican Radio from April 29, 2014
  13. ^ Katrin Hansing: Rastafari a lo cubano ( Spanish ) La Ventana. May 18, 2005. Retrieved June 10, 2014.