Leonel Linares is a gay Cuban man. He has attended many masses and other church services in his life, but never felt comfortable when he was there. Four years ago, a friend told him about the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) in the city of Matanzas, about 100 kilometres east of Havana, the capital of Cuba.
Today, Linares is a deacon in the Cuban branch of the MCC, an international Protestant denomination that openly welcomes people from the LGBTIQ community, enabling them to find a space to practise their faith and express their identity.
Founded in California in 1968, the MCC expounds a liberal interpretation of Christianity based on respect, love and justice. It encourages its members to further its aims through social activism and a radical approach to inclusion. In Cuba, the MCC welcomes not just the LGBTIQ community but people from other spiritual traditions including Afro-Cuban religions, which are frowned upon in most of the country’s churches.
“The thing I like most about it is that it makes me feel useful, because of the work within the community,” says Linares. Since the Cuban branch was established in 2015, the MCC has formed links with several socially progressive organisations, including the National Centre for Sex Education (a government-funded organisation led by Mariela Castro, the daughter of president Raul Castro); the Martin Luther King Memorial Centre, a group that unites Christians of all denominations, provides popular education and links up with community development projects across the Americas; and the People’s Teachers Network.
The MCC’s activities include holding public discussions about sexual health, and handing out condoms and information leaflets. Members of the congregation also help clean up rivers and beaches, and host activities for children.
“We always seek to create alliances with projects that relate to what we believe in. The more alliances, the better,” says Reverend Elaine Saralegui, an MCC minister in Cuba.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the church has supported elderly people without families of their own. Members have brought them food and kept them company. They also rescued stray cats and dogs, and tried to find them new homes.
As Cuba went into lockdown, the MCC set up a WhatsApp group where the congregation could pray together and share their worries. “We’re not a chapel or temple-based church – we’re a church without walls,” says Yivi Cruz, another MCC pastor. “We go where we are needed.”
The personal is political
Lidia Portilla speaks slowly when telling her story. The Methodist Church in Matanzas was the place where she took her first steps towards embracing Christianity, and the origin of much of her suffering. “Of course, being homosexual is a sin for them. I was confused and I thought: ‘My God, how can I love you if I’m a lesbian? I’m being a hypocrite.’”
She remembers fasting, praying on her knees, asking for God to change her, so that she could find a man to marry and make her happy. She decided to stop attending church, although she found herself returning every so often. “It was a state of constant, terrible instability,” she says.
But then Portilla found the MCC, which embraces sexual and gender diversity as part of its mission. She turned her life around by accepting her sexual orientation. “I felt so good, freed from all that weight I was carrying.” To Portilla, the MCC’s healing attitude and its constructive message have the power to change many people’s lives.
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Eileen Sosin | Radio Free (2020-11-26T13:00:51+00:00) The Cuban church opening its doors to LGBTIQ worshippers. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/26/the-cuban-church-opening-its-doors-to-lgbtiq-worshippers/
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