Managing religions in Cuba: Closing the 20th century

African inspired traditions represent a distinct cultural phenomenon within Cuba’s national, multicultural aesthetic.  Combined with Protestants, practitioners of the traditions experienced major changes in their ability to participate in affairs of the socialist’s state.  This paper is a descriptive analysis of changes in the relationship between religious believers and Cuban policy.  Inspiration for research that undergirds the paper came from Emil Durkheim’s proclamation for sociologists that decisive cause of a “social fact” is to be found within the preceding social facts that researchers must investigate.  Jürgen Habermas offered a similar assertion that sociology must search for “verstehenden, or interpretive, access” to its research domain(s) because processes already exist for reaching understanding and it is through and in these that the domain is antecedently constituted before any theoretical grasp of it occurs.  

            The proposition of this paper is that preceding Cuban social facts, though rarely referenced, are directly linked to religious believers’ current ability to participate in governmental affairs.   This was a major shift for those who practice Cuba’s distinct – Africa inspired traditions and for Protestants.  Field research with the two categories of religious customs undergirds the paper and the analysis is based on a verstehenden/interpretive understanding of the link between preceding social facts and changes in religious practitioners’ ability to publicly participate in the socialist government’s infrastructures. 

            Changes for the traditions and for Protestantism were effected in the decade of 1984 to 1994 as the socialist government initiated official sanction for believers’ participation in state affairs.  President Fidel Ruiz Castro attendance at a 1984 Havana worship honoring Martin Luther King Jr. was the watershed event that precipitated the definitive series of nationally televised conversations between religious believers and state officials and produced the eventual changes in government policy.  This paper will engage these issues.