Bush administration targets Cuban churches

[IndianaGreen]

Bush administration targets Cuban churches
Author: W. T. Whitney Jr.
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 08/17/06 13:51

Church leaders the world over have objected to a misleading reference to the Cuban Council of Churches that appeared in the July 10 report from the President Bush’s “Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba.”

The report states that to “tighten regulations for the export of humanitarian items,” Washington plans to “ensure that exports are consigned to entities that support independent civil society and are not regime administered or controlled organizations, such as the Cuban Council of Churches.”

The Cuban Council of Churches has been coordinating church-based humanitarian aid in Cuba for 71 years. The Rev. Lucius Walker, director of the U.S. organization Pastors for Peace, told the World that the council is the oldest such group in Latin America and the most inclusive in the Western Hemisphere.

Council President Rhode González Zorilla, a pastor of the Christian Pentecostal Church and the first woman to hold the job, ascribed allegations of government control “to a deliberate disregard of the history of the work of Cuban churches and of the council itself.” She pointed out that “relations between the churches of Cuba and the United States are historical. Nothing will be able to keep us apart as churches.”

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/9689/1/336/