Two Protestant churches were demolished and at least three church leaders held incommunicado in Cuba on 8 January.
State security agents and police also blocked off roads and surrounded the home of Mario Felix Lleonart Barroso, a prominent pastor and religious freedom activist, in an unsuccessful attempt to arrest him, but they did manage to detain scores of other Cubans linked to the churches to prevent them from going to the site of the demolitions.
Both churches belonged to the Apostolic Movement, an unregistered network of Protestant churches. Government officials initiated the destruction of the Revd Bernardo de Quesada Salomon’s church, an open-air structure in Versalles, Camaguey, and that of the Revd Juan Carlos Núñez Velázquez, in Victoria de las Tunas, without prior warning in the early hours of 8 January.
Numerous Apostolic Movement church leaders in Camaguey and Las Tunas, as well as other parts of the country, were also arbitrarily detained or confined to their homes by state security agents, presumably to stop them from going to support the churches being demolished. Many reported that their mobile phones were cut off.
The demolition of the churches takes place in the worrying context that last year 2,000 churches linked to the legally recognised Assemblies of God were declared by the Government to be illegal and many of these are designated for demolition.
