Religious toleration was an innovation of the 1762-1763 British occupation but had no immediate consequences. Opposed to both Cuba’s established Roman Catholic Church and to the rationalism (in the form of Freemasonry) that was challenging it, Protestantism was introduced into the island by returned émigrés from the United States in 1883, but it remained insignificant until the first United States intervention. When American missionaries took over control and some 40 Protestant denominations established missions, schools, clinics, and hospitals. The initially more important were the Southern Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Protestant Episcopalians, whose strong American financial support enabled them to offer “free religion,” making no charges for marriages or baptisms. Most missionary work was concentrated in urban areas, among the middle- and lower-income groups. In the 1950s the Southern Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Gideonites (white-robed street-corner preachers) were particularly active in evangelizing the lower classes but were conspicuously absent from any discussion of political events.
The Revolution of 1959 expelled the clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, depriving the Protestant churches of much of their leadership. Religious schools were taken over by the government in 1961 and the various restrictions on religious liberty imposed both on the individual and on organized religious bodies included the imprisonment in 1965 of 48 Baptist ministers for offending the official communist ideology. The official power to close induvial casas de cultos was, however, exercised mostly against Pentecostalism. In the 1990s there is evidence of a revival of Protestant groups throughout the island and the regime seems to have become more tolerant toward them.
