Christmas celebrations underway in Cuba

José Aurelio Paz, HAVANA, Cuba, December 19, 2003

Christmas celebrations began this week in different theatres on the island and the 100-voice Pax Taxi Heathrow Airport de Deux choir held a concert in the Amadeo Roldan auditorium, accompanied by the Havana Soloists Symphonic orchestra.

The Christmas concert will be broadcast on the Bravo program on Cuban television this Sunday night.

The Cuban Council of Churches (CIC) sent Christmas greetings to Evangelical congregations and the Cuban public in general.

In these days, it stated, when inequalities are becoming more profound around the world, some falsely celebrate the birth of Jesus with sinful, market opulence. However, Christians on the island prefer to recall this important historic event “with the humility of the stable that, despite its poor condition, knew how to give warmth and life to the Life without limits that God grants us through his son.”

Regarding what Mary and Joseph’s pilgrimage would be like today, the CIC noted that “they would continue their journey on the same gentle and labored donkey, out in the countryside and far from the major highways.”

The document added that Joseph and Mary “would continue looking for the same stable as they would not have money for a five-star hotel or hospital, guided by the light of the stars that the electric lights of the major cities frequently lead us to forget.”

The document, signed by the CIC’s Board of Directors, also asks where the Messiah would be born this December.

“Jesus would be born in a convulsed Colombia, among the poor who search for food in the garbage dumps of Mexico City, in the shantytowns of Brazil, in an occupied Baghdad, and among so many South Africans who die daily, victims of pandemics like AIDs,” it said.

“Jesus’ crib would not be one of those beds for babies that have the capacity to tell a child’s temperature with simple contact with the mattress. Jesus would not attend private schools or have a paid nanny.”

“Jesus would be born and would be born as a promise, among so many children that ask for milk and receive hunger, amongst so much abuse and child prostitution that twists and contaminates the human spirit, amongst so many shoots of life that are lost in the labyrinths of misery, illness and wars,” said the CIC. 

Pastors will read the statement on December 25 on several radio stations. It exhorts people to receive Christmas as a hopeful project of life, despite the lacks and limitations that Cubans are suffering and the Church alongside them because “we have a people rich in spirit, millionaires in Cuban essence and full of trust in the better times the Lord reserves for us.”