A New Cuba: Cuban Baptists on the Shifting Sands of Faith and Nation

In 1953 a sociopolitical shift began in Cuba that culminated in the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Among Protestants, responses to the Revolution were divided. The Baptist Convention of Eastern Cuba (CBCOr), then operating under the auspices of the American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS), even split over the question of participation. Those opposed grounded their stance in the New Hampshire Confession of Faith of 1833, a foreign confession that complicated the indigenised character of their community. Yet roughly seventy years earlier, Cuban Protestants had been instrumental in another revolutionary movement: the Cuban War of Independence (1895). This article argues that Protestantism in Cuba was never a passive extension of US influence but a contested arena where Cubans negotiated questions of faith and nationhood. At times it served as a resource for articulating national identity and resisting external domination; at others it provoked crises in religious identity that fractured Protestant communities. By comparing these two moments, the article asks: what were the divergent Protestant responses that emerged between the independence era and the Cuban Revolution? And what do these contrasts reveal about the shifting role of religion in Cuban public life? Attending to these entanglements demonstrates that religion was not marginal to Cuba's political history but central to how some Cubans reimagined nationhood and enacted resistance.