214 Chapter 9
evangelization. Each Catholic diocese in Cuba has a Center of Forma-
tion in the Faith for religious workshops and bible study. In the 1990s,
Cuban church members created Casas de Misión in private homes as a
way to evangelize and provide houses of worship, especially in areas
with no Catholic churches or where existing churches were in disre-
pair. The Casas are meant to facilitate a sense of community amongst
Catholics on the island and serve as informal religious gatherings for
prayer and bible discussion. In 1991 the church also began providing
charity services through Caritas Cuba, which is affiliated with the
Rome-based Catholic relief agency Caritas Internationalis. Caritas Cuba
assists the needy and elderly through the distribution of food, cloth-
ing, medicine, and various personal items.
The only form of media available to the Cuban Catholic Church to
communicate with their faithful is through the rudimentary publica-
tion of Catholic magazines. In the 1990s church leaders gained per-
mission from the government to publish their own magazines with
the stipulation that they only be distributed within the churches them-
selves and that they don’t directly criticize or condemn the state. In
certain instances, some magazines have gone too far and they have
been subjected not only to complaints from regime officials but cer-
tain forms of self-censorship. However, these publications routinely
contain articles by Catholic priests and scholars that not only promote
the social doctrine of the church but discuss a very wide range of
issues, including politics, society, culture, economics, and science.
Magazines such as Espacio Laical and Palabra Nueva (advertised as “the
voice of the church”) are described by church leaders as ‘formative-
informative’ magazines, in that they are meant to serve as comprehen-
sive alternative sources of information in Cuba. They constitute an
important part of the Cuban Catholic Church’s project to promote an
alternative cultural meaning-system, aiming both to form Cuban
Catholics in the faith and inform them from a different socio-political
perspective than that offered by the official ideology.
Still, prudence dominates the Catholic Church’s agenda in Cuba.
Church officials are often pressured by extreme political opponents in