What Australians Can Learn from Communist Cuba’s  Crackdown on Churches

Cuba’s pastors are facing increased harassment.

Some are disappearing, then randomly reappearing with signs they’ve been tortured.

Unregistered (“illegal”) churches stare down the constant threat of closure, and house churches are being more heavily regulated.

The Cuban Communist Party’s (CCP) crackdown on Christians has intensified since 2021. This was in response to mass pro-freedom protests, which had the backing of many Church leaders.

Dissent wasn’t just plugged into COVID overreach, or constant Communist violations of human rights; it was related to the handover of power between Miguel Diaz-Canel and Raúl Castro.

Bold Cubans saw the handover as an opportunity to throw off the chains of Communism and the socialist state.

Voice of the Martyrs (VOM) explained that since the 2021 protests went viral, Communist suppression tactics have become more subtle.  

Christians are discriminated against in the workplace, many are being watched, and some live under a form of house arrest.

With legal church buildings being seized, house churches are also exploding in number.

In an attempt to squash church growth, church leaders are either subjected to government harassment, detained without representation or forced to sit before low-to-mid-tier Communist bureaucrats for interrogation.

During 12 years of ministry work in Cuba, Joel was arrested 17 times for preaching, distributing Bibles or evangelizing. By the time Joel and his wife moved from the town in 2008, they had planted 25 churches led by locally trained pastors serving more than 6,000 Christians. pic.twitter.com/QYmPtzqZWw

— Voice of the Martyrs (@VOM_USA) August 13, 2025

Pastor Maikel Pupu Velázquez is a recent example. 

He was arrested on July 9 and detained for 14 hours after delivering epilepsy medication to the mother of two political prisoners, Jorge and Nadir Martin Perdomo.

They’re both serving time for “contempt and public disorder” for participating in 2021’s peaceful protests.

Speaking about the government kidnapping of Velázquez, International Christian Concern (ICC) said, after dropping off the medicine, the pastor “was abruptly barred from entering their mother’s home.”

Velázquez vanished following a phone call to another pastor about the matter.

In response to his disappearance, the Alliance of Christians of Cuba (ACC) rallied pastors to investigate.

Although they searched hospitals, detention centres, and police stations, Velázquez appeared to have disappeared without a trace.

They eventually located him at 2 am the next day outside his home.

ICC described the pastor as being “clearly shaken, having endured threats, and a traumatic interrogation.”

Velázquez also appeared to have been drugged. He was uncharacteristically “erratic, sometimes yelling and at other times falling eerily silent.”

“When questioned, he would not disclose details of the incident,” ICC recalled.

Open Doors’ (OD) ranks Communist Cuba in the top 30 countries where simply being a Christian could mean forfeiting one’s life, limb, and/or liberty.

Leading causes of persecution, Open Doors said, were “secular intolerance, dictatorial paranoia,” and Communist bullying. 

Cuba’s Communists landed the country with an OD ranking of 26, which is a shockingly massive jump from 2021, when it ranked 51. 

Agreeing with VOM and ICC, Open Doors asserted that “Government action against dissidents has increased.” 

Church leaders and Christian activists “who speak out against human rights abuses, and who support protestors, all face hostility, including arbitrary arrest.”

Notably, the most dangerous countries to be a Christian are either Communist or Muslim, followed by Hindu and Buddhist.

North Korea took the number 1 spot.

Muslim majority countries filled the 2-10 spots, with Islamic majority nations making up 62% of Open Door’s entire 2025 World Watch list.

2% are Hindu. 6% were Buddhist. 14% were Communist or Socialist.

35 out of 50 nations where persecution of Christians is widespread or socially and politically acceptable are Muslim.

India comes in at number 11, and China ranked 15 as being vehemently anti-Church, anti-Christian, and anti-Christ. 

Australia is 43% Christian, which makes Open Doors’ ranking of Islamic majority nations, Communist China, and Hindu Nationalist India more than a footnote.

These numbers justify serious questions about so-called decolonisation and whether its real end game is de-Christianisation, through a racist campaign of de-Anglicisation.

The rankings also justify concerns about the preservation of Australia’s monocultural Christian foundations and its cherished multiethnic social cohesion.

Especially since the Australian Labor government’s mass immigration demographics are dominated by Islam, and immigrants from China and India: two of Open Doors’ top 15 countries where the persecution of Christians is either openly practised, encouraged or tolerated.

I’m not saying all Chinese immigrants are Communist. Some would be Christians fleeing the systemic state-sponsored terrorism.

This nuance, though, doesn’t negate the necessity of asking questions or drawing tentative conclusions.

Cuba’s Christian community vs the Cuban Communist Party is the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

Praying for Cuba’s persecuted Christians must go hand-in-hand with honouring their witness.

Their suffering offers us an open door into the sobering reality of what an unchecked government, doing everything it can to ensure it stays in power, looks like. 

Government oppression and sectarianism will be our new normal, unless the importing of culturally incompatible ethno-voting blocs, who largely favour Labor, and the Left’s culture wars, is opposed en masse.