As the world reflects on the legacy of late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, a former Southern Baptist missionary imprisoned by the Castro regime in the 1960s is remembering what Castro could not do: kill the church.
David Fite was arrested in Havana in 1965 on what he calls fabricated charges of “trafficking in foreign currency” and “ideological diversionism.”
Then a missionary and the father of three young boys, including a one-month-old, Fite was incarcerated for three and a half years before being released in 1968.
Fite’s wife Margaret, whose father and fellow missionary Herbert Caudill was jailed along with Fite, told Baptist Press the missionaries’ arrest seemed to stem from their Christian faith and not their American citizenship, since 53 Cuban believers were taken into custody on the same night.
She told the Baptist Press, ”What [the Cuban regime] wanted to do was to kill the Baptist churches.. There was no international problem at all. It was just an attack on religion.”
But as David Fite noted, “It didn’t work.”
All the believers imprisoned with Fite were ministers, and many had been pastoring churches. Still, the Sunday following the arrests, “not one single church failed to have its worship service,””And in every church someone got up in that pulpit.”
The Gospel, David Fite said, “is not limited by political organizations. It moves ahead with a message that is beyond any oppression.”