When a church says the country is not working, those in power must listen

The pastoral letter from the Episcopal Church in Cuba gives institutional expression to hardships that, according to its signatories, run through daily life: food that is expensive or unavailable, medicine shortages, blackouts, and water-supply problems. It also warns of deteriorating health care and education. The letter presents these difficulties not as abstractions, but as conditions affecting specific families and communities.

The document was signed by Bishop Ángel Rivera Rodríguez and 21 clergy members of the Diocese of Cuba and circulated on social media. Its significance does not depend on statistics, which do not appear in the available information, but on a religious institution’s decision to describe social suffering publicly and make an explicit appeal to those who govern.

The letter also recognizes the efforts of doctors and teachers who try to do their work amid those constraints. That acknowledgment prevents the message from being reduced to a general denunciation: it notes that essential services continue in part because workers, according to the clergy, try to fulfill their calling despite the shortages.

The signatories also mention mass migration and inequality, which they connect to separated families, emptied communities, and the difficulty of sustaining daily life. The available material does not quantify those phenomena or allow their scale to be measured, but it makes clear that the Church includes them in a broader reading of the crisis, rather than one confined to shortages.

The intervention takes on a second focus by expressing solidarity with Anna Sofía Benítez, known as Anna Bensi, and her mother, Caridad Silvente. Both received sentences of two years of restricted liberty after a trial held on the Friday before the consulted reports were published. The reports say the case is connected to recording and sharing a video of a police officer.

According to the published information, the officer had gone to the home in March to deliver a summons addressed to Silvente. The Episcopal letter expresses frustration and pain over what it describes as violence, intimidation, and police harassment against people asserting their rights, and it says expression is protected by the Constitution. The judicial reasoning and the authorities’ response are not available here.

That lack of information requires a distinction between pastoral solidarity and a complete reconstruction of the proceedings. The statement does not replace the judicial record and cannot establish on its own what evidence the court considered. It does raise a public question: how civic expression is protected when an act connected to recording and sharing police conduct ends in a criminal sentence.

The Church says its reflection seeks dialogue rather than confrontation, but its appeal to heed the public outcry contains a concrete political demand: address basic needs and do not answer criticism by asking for further sacrifices. The value of that appeal will depend in part on whether the authorities respond with verifiable information and measures that can be evaluated.

Questions remain about how the sentence develops, the conditions imposed on the two women, and the material situation described by the clergy; the available information does not answer them. In the meantime, the letter records that discontent is not expressed only through individual complaints: a religious institution is also framing it as a responsibility of those charged with serving and protecting the population.