Religious Persecution Underpins Anti-American Regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua

Excerpt

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Pope Leo in Rome in early May, he came with a short list of discussion topics. Cuba was on it, as was the persecution of Christians in Havana and around the world. Both the United States and the Vatican share, as Rubio put it, a “concern about the destruction of religious liberty.”

Few places exemplify this destruction better than Cuba and Nicaragua. Havana’s communist regime and Managua’s Murillo-Ortega dictatorship operate the most egregious state-run campaigns against Christianity in the Americas. In these majority-Christian countries with deep Catholic roots, churches and other faith-based institutions face persecution because their very existence challenges the underpinnings of the regimes.

Connor Pfeiffer is senior director of government relations at FDD Action and a former congressional staffer who worked on Western Hemisphere policy in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Samuel Ben-Ur is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.