To totalitarian regimes, suppression of the opposition, in often violent ways, has long been a key to staying in power.

And among the opposition in so many lands under the thumb of dictators, religion is often near the top of regime opponents.

The Catholic Church sees this first hand in a number of nations. The Church has long been suppressed under Cuba's Communist regime, the landscape for Christians perennially unfriendly in Cuba since Fidel Castro overthrew Fulgencio Batista's government to establish one-party Communist rule in 1959. In Nicaragua the latest United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) report released June 28 paints a disquieting portrait of the deterioration of religious freedom under the socialist regime of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo.

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Jeff King, president of the non-partisan Christian human rights advocacy organization International Christian Concern (ICC), said any concerned outsider seeking more knowledge about what drives Cuba's Communists and the Ortega and Murillo regime needs to understand the deep-rooted ideological detestation.

“These Marxist governments say they hate religion,” said King. “They hate God — they say there is no God. In the end, they hate God and the people of God, and it is a part of their existence.”

King added that “communism only works with bullets and blades. It is only held together with tremendous force. (The rulers) are always hyper-sensitive and vigilant about any political movement that can gather steam and be a threat to them.”

Within these totalitarian republics, Catholics and Christians are mercilessly persecuted and criminalized. In Nicaragua, USCIRF stated the dictatorial couple uses “laws on cybercrimes, financial crimes, legal registration for not-for-profit organizations and sovereignty and self-determination to persecute religious communities and religious freedom advocates.”

Repelled by its human rights advocacy, the Ortega-Murillo government continues to choke Catholicism through “arbitrarily arresting, imprisoning and exiling clergy and laypeople and shuttering and seizing the property of Catholic charitable and educational organizations.” Most prominent is Bishop Rolando Álvarez, the former bishop of Matagalpa sentenced to 26 years in prison and stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship upon refusing exile in the United States with over 200 other political prisoners. He was expelled along with 14 priests and two seminarians to the Vatican on Jan. 14.

The crackdown on clerics has been executed with extreme prejudice, with dozens of Church officials and laypeople jailed. Notably, authorities seized Jimmy Antonio Bonilla and Emmanuel Gutiérrez on April 5, 2023. They were sentenced to eight years imprisonment for allegedly participating in a Holy Week procession, a banned activity throughout the country.

During the widespread 2018 Nicaraguan protests against social security reforms that increased taxes while decreasing benefits, Ortega blasted the country’s Catholic bishops as “coup mongers,” and said churches were stockpiling weapons on behalf of protesters. On Sept. 28 of that year, the president declared political protests illegal.

While antagonism against Catholics has particularly flared up in Nicaragua over the past six years, the landscape for Christians has been perennially unfriendly in Cuba for more than 60 years. Following Castro's ascent to power in 1959, hundreds of priests and religious leaders were swiftly ejected in retaliation for criticizing the new regime. By 1963, there were only 200 pastors ministering on the island, which had over 7.5 million people at the time.

Castro also launched a propaganda campaign to denigrate Catholicism; he shut down churches, banned the celebration of Christmas for nearly 30 years, threatened priests and parishioners into silence, placed houses of worship under surveillance and arrested dissenters.

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Following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, a more tolerant and conciliatory stance towards religion emerged. This stance accelerated following Pope John Paul II’s historic 1998 visit, when he urged the government to grant Cubans “freedom, the means and the space" to exercise their faith.

One of the noticeable fruits of the late pontiff’s visit was that celebrating Christmas became legalized again. Also, people of faith and Catholic social service agencies felt more affirmed in expressing their convictions and practising ministerial work visibly for a time.

But the pendulum swung back toward brutal hostility three years ago, after the July 11-17, 2021 mass protests against the Communist Party of Cuba, now led by President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Shouting “Libertad,” the Spanish chant for freedom, hundreds of thousands of citizens decried the woeful economic conditions, the crackdown on civil liberties and false promises of economic and political reform.

Over 700 protesters were arrested and hammered with sentences of up to 25 years. Among the crowd was the dissident priest Fr. Castor José Álvarez Devesa. He disappeared into the Cuban legal system for over a week and was subjected to a brutal beating. 

In a recent interview with Cubanet, Álvarez spoke about what motivated him to join the “Patria y Vida (Homeland and Life)” protests.

“How can I leave them? Like a father sees his children and says, ‘Well, how can I leave them?' That resulted in them beating me, injuring me, detaining me at night in a jail cell, then they put a cautionary measure on me prohibiting my exit from the country — in addition, (I needed) permission to leave the municipality and (could) leave the house only when necessary."

Alvarez did not abide by these rules.

“I did not stay home,” Alvarez said. “I said, I’m going out, just like when they told Jesus they were looking for Him, He said, ‘Tell them I’m going to keep doing my work’ — I kept doing my job.”

Luis Zúñiga, a member of the Miami-based Assembly of Cuban Resistance, knows too well of the atrocities confronting protesters in prison. He was a political prisoner for 19 years throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

“When somebody takes a step to confront socialism, and they are sent to prison, (the regime) tries to destroy that individual man or woman by any ways psychologically or physically,” said Zúñiga. “Prisons are places where people hunger and starve every single day. The food they provide is the basic to stay alive: no fruits, no vegetables — nothing to provide them with health, just survival.

“Also, it was made difficult for family members to visit so as to break the family link and ties and affect him or her psychologically,” continued Zúñiga. 

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Outside of the prison system, even though Internet censorship, a heavy military presence and the surveillance state pervade the country, a revolutionary spirit remains. The Cuban Conflict Observatory (OCC) recorded over 5,749 protests in 2023, up from 3,923 in 2022.

Zuniga said Canadians could do their part in counteracting the regime by not economically feeding the Cuban tourism industry, which sustains the country’s military.