North American Protestantism and Cross-cultural Religious Encounter in the Shadow of Empire: a twentieth century Cuban case

“My project offers a fresh look at how North American Protestant Christianity developed in Cuba at the turn of the 20th century. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Grace Vargas Southern Methodist University Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

My historical research is located roughly between the chronological boundaries of 1890 and 1959 and focuses on the Convencion Bautista de Cuba Oriental (CBCOr) - Baptists in Eastern Cuba who became the progeny of the American Baptist Churches in the U.S. Employing World Christianity theory, my analysis of religious documents – correspondence, meeting minutes, pamphlets, sermons, misc. administrative documents, etc. – demonstrates that Cubans were co-agents of mission, not merely passive recipients as the existing historiography suggests.

My project contributes to a known historiographical problem: the absence of Cuban actors in North American accounts of the birth of Protestantism in Cuba. North American critical scholarship argues that imperialism, expansionism, and hegemony were the principle operative forces for U.S. Protestant missions to Cuba. (Yaremko, 2000; Corse, 2007) These lenses dominate the narrative, spotlighting U.S. missionaries and silencing Cuban actors in this religious encounter. My project seeks to appeal the verdict that Cubans passively allowed missionaries to build carbon copies of U.S. Protestantism in Cuba. Today, both Cuban Protestants and Anglo-American Protestants in the U.S. remain largely unaware of this history. This has contributed to the replication of early 20th century paternalistic and hegemonic attitudes toward immigrant diaspora churches in North America. A more balanced historical interpretation has the potential to affect existing relationships between these two North American Christian communities and others.

My research also fills a gap in knowledge about religion in Cuba more generally since most studies focus on either Catholicism in Cuba or how religion survived the 1950’s Socialist revolution that was officially anti-religious