Christians travel by boat, bus, train — and even a cargo truck — to attend a national discipleship gathering.
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MATANZAS, CUBA — René Sánchez Blanco sailed eight hours on a ferry from the Isle of Youth to Cuba’s mainland and then spent five hours on buses.
Mario and Yani Suárez waited three days in line at a bus station in western Cuba. The couple slept in the terminal to buy tickets for an all-day, multi-stop journey.
Samuel Rondón Aguilar and his mother, Margarita, endured 24 hours on a train from eastern Cuba.
At a desperate time for this Caribbean island nation — crippled by severe fuel and food shortages, frequent power outages and rising tensions with the United States, its powerful neighbor 90 miles to the north — faith in Jesus brought together Cuban believers this week.
From all over the island — which stretches nearly 800 miles — Christians came to attend the fifth annual Missionary Congress in west-central Cuba. The five-day event celebrates church-planting efforts in the socialist nation of 9 million souls.
“It’s a horrible trip,” Aguilar, 24, said of the train ride from Rio Cauto in Cuba’s eastern province of Granma. “But it’s a huge blessing to be here with the brothers and sisters.”
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The fuel crisis has disrupted the availability and affordability of gasoline for personal vehicles and limited the frequency and reliability of normal public transportation options.
Despite the challenges, more than 300 men, women and children filled the Versalles Church of Christ, about 60 miles east of Havana, on Saturday night and Sunday morning. A smaller group of leaders engaged in evangelistic training Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
The host congregation — which baptized 236 people in 2025 — meets in a government-authorized, open-air auditorium in Matanzas, the namesake capital of Cuba’s province of Matanzas.
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Over the weekend, attendees sang, prayed and studied the Bible — and enjoyed time for fellowship with like-minded disciples experiencing the same societal troubles.
“We find spiritual nourishment here,” said Yani Suárez, 33, a mother of three who — like most of the Cubans interviewed for this story — spoke through a Spanish-language interpreter. “We find the fellowship. We find the love. And we just become renewed.
“At our home congregation, there’s just a few of us,” added Suárez, a minister’s wife in Cuba’s far western province of Pinar del Río. “It’s difficult, and at times it feels like we’re all alone. Here, we get to see other Christians, and we get to see that we’re not alone.”
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Even a week before the conference, organizer Tony Fernandez — the Versalles church’s longtime minister — doubted if he could pull it off.
“I was really worried, and my wife knew that I didn’t have everything that I needed to do this,” said Fernandez, who has helped plant more than 50 Cuban congregations. “But she’s got groups of women who pray every day starting at 5 a.m.
“And they prayed, and God works,” he added. “We were able to have transportation. We were able to get fuel.”
