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THE MARTIN LUTHER KING CENTER IN CUBA: IMMERSED IN THE WORLD AND THE
REVOLUTION  
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Chris Gilbert
December 17, 2025
MR Online
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_ Revolutionary transformation cannot do without revolutionary
subjectivity and therefore cannot leave aside the question of
religion. _

Network of Popular Educators in Alamar, la Habana del Este, Cuba,
November 2025. ,

 

Now I know that there are many more things in heaven and earth than
I’ve dreamt of. I never expected to find a Baptist-inspired project
that enthusiastically defends gender and sexual diversity, socialism,
and the Cuban Revolution. Yet that was precisely what I found at the
Martin Luther King Center in Cuba when I visited in late November 2025
and was received in its offices by key members of its team, including
Marilín Peña, Joel Suárez—son of the Center’s founder—and
Sayonara Tamayo.

In fact, the MLK Center is full of paradoxes. First, it is a
Christian-inspired initiative committed both to socialism and to the
Cuban Revolution. Second, it has its roots in revolutionary
Protestantism, on a continent where the liberatory current has been
mostly Catholic. Third, it maintains links with progressive church
groups in the United States—the very country that has tried to bring
down Cuba’s government and has placed the island under a genocidal
blockade for more than half a century. Yet revolutions are always made
of paradoxes, as Lenin’s wartime train ride through Germany and Hugo
Chávez’s military background both demonstrate.

Joel tells me how the MLK Center was born. His father belonged to a
“terribly conservative” Baptist tendency (I later found out that
the Ebenezer Church next to the Center is the very one that dictator
Fulgencio Batista attended). So when the Revolution triumphed in 1959
many of its parishioners simply left, since they thought “God
himself had gone to Miami.” However, there were others, including
Joel’s father, the Reverend Raúl Suárez, who stayed. They were
inspired by the Revolution’s project of social justice and wanted to
move forward as part of it. As a result, they developed a
progressive—even revolutionary—Christianity, somewhat in isolation
from the powerful Catholic liberation theology that was emerging at
the time.

Their initial work of distancing themselves from the conservative
ideology of U.S. missionaries and walking the new path with the
Revolution went on for several decades. The Center itself was formed
in the late 1980s and named in honor of the great civil rights leader,
because they wanted to take up work outside the remit of a church. Its
two pillars were, on the one hand, “macro-ecumenical work” with a
wide range of Cuban religious groups from the perspective of
liberatory theology and, on the other hand, popular education in the
communities. The latter was conceived in keeping with the original
project of Paulo Freire, which involves raising political awareness
while fostering popular protagonism and revolutionary transformation.

Over the years, the Center has trained thousands of popular educators.
Marilín explains how the educators often find themselves in complex
situations. “The Christians see us as communists, and the communists
see us as Christians—though some of the latter recognize we are more
communist than they are.” At one point, these educators felt
themselves to be too spread out and isolated, each in their respective
communities. They needed a support structure. That is why in 2007 the
Center decided to create its _networks_ of popular educators. There
are now thirty-seven such networks established across the Cuban
territory. The Center also works with popular movements across the
continent, in the spirit of Cuba’s longstanding revolutionary
internationalism.

I am visiting Cuba with an interest in the question of how popular
power combines with the revolutionary leadership exercised by the
state and the Party. This combination seems to me to be an extremely
important but underrecognized feature of every successful and
sustainable anti-imperialist revolution. There can be no doubt that
the principal contradiction in the world today is between imperialism
and oppressed nations. However, one should not forget that carrying
out the struggle against the main enemy—the U.S.-led imperialist
system—requires addressing other, subordinate contradictions at the
same time. That is how popular power is built and maintained in a
mutually reinforcing relationship with revolutionary state power.

The subordinate contradictions that need to be addressed include those
that are directly generated by capitalist exploitation and also by
gender and racial oppression. Confronting these issues is important
not only because it is right in itself, but also because doing so is
necessary if the primary struggle against imperialism is to be viable
and sustainable. In a general sense, it is only by addressing issues
of social emancipation that one can guarantee the incorporation of the
bases in what is necessarily a long-term anti-imperialist project.

Cuba has a long history of mobilizing people and building popular
power as part of social emancipation. The history of its mass
organizations that express popular power, such as the Committees in
Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), the Federation of University
Students (FEU), and the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), is a glorious
one. On an ideological level, the fusion of revolutionary leadership
with popular power is reflected in how the Cuban Revolution adopted
Marxism—Leninism as its guiding ideology and socialism as its goal,
but grafted this project onto a deeply developed tradition of
patriotic, democratic, and anticolonial thought that is an important
part of Cuban national culture.

The central figure in that endogenous tradition is José Martí, a
revolutionary leader, writer, and patriot of the 19th century who
organized the struggle for Cuba’s independence. The fusion of
popular and national components with the aspiration to achieve
socialism through scientific means (i.e., the Party and Marxist
theory) is one of the great achievements of the Cuban Revolution.
Symbolically, one could represent it with a triangle at the base of
which are Martí and Marx, both feeding into the revolutionary thought
and action of Fidel Castro.

Beyond ideology and symbolism, however, the organizational expression
of this fusion consists in how the state and party relate to the
multiple expressions and institutions of popular power—the power of
the base. In recent times, these grassroots-level institutions have
suffered. The longstanding effects of the cruel U.S. blockade, along
with the simple loss of momentum following the heroic “peak” first
decades of the Revolution, have made them less dynamic. Sometimes the
formal organizational component dominates over content and substance.

That is why the work of the MLK Center is so important at present. The
people it brings together are revolutionaries and communists (many are
Party members) who also connect with broad social bases—through
their Christian-inspired work and through their efforts as popular
educators, whose central mission is strengthening communities and
activating popular participation.

The day after my meeting with the MLK Center’s coordination, I was
able to accompany Center team member Suray Cabrera in a visit to one
of the networks of popular education _in situ_. The locale we visited
is in a residential area of East Havana called Alamar, in the Micro X
neighborhood, where the Center’s Network of Educators works jointly
with one of the Neighborhood Integral Transformation Workshops created
by the municipal government.

Seated before us in a circle are twenty people of different age groups
who have come together in a space decorated with posters of Fidel,
Chávez, and Che and banners of the 26th of July Movement. Their
skills and backgrounds are very diverse. Some are teachers, some are
retired professionals, others are social or natural scientists. All
are involved in grassroots organizing or educational work. Their
projects in the community include an extracurricular program with
secondary schools, adult education, craft workshops, sports and tai
chi sessions, and raising awareness about environmental issues in this
coastal region.

Once a year, each network drafts a plan for its activities,
objectives, and intentions with the Center, and in turn receives a
budget. There is two-way coordination, guided by the idea of building
the social fabric, strengthening participation, and expanding popular
control in the territory. As we go around the circle of those
assembled, they explain what their work is. An older man takes a
different tack and refers to the importance of Fidel’s legacy in
these times for both Venezuela and Cuba, highlighting his connections
with ordinary people. A woman to my right recounts the success of
their children’s baseball team, which they call the
“peloteritos.”

When I ask what impact the network makes in this area, they respond
that there is more participation here, better conflict mediation,
better organized community activities, and better interaction with the
delegates of popular power. They close the meeting referring to a
strikingly appropriate quote by José Martí that they have taken as a
motto: “One must teach through conversation, as Socrates did—from
village to village, from house to house.”

These projects in the communities are humble ones, but only in
appearance. In that sense they resemble Raúl Suárez, the MLK
Center’s soft-spoken founder, who turned 90 this year. Raúl was a
Baptist pastor who remained loyal to the Revolution from the
beginning, despite being treated with some suspicion at first for his
beliefs, and was even wounded in its defense at Playa Girón. In 1993,
he did a successful hunger strike in opposition to the U.S. blockade,
specifically to force president Bill Clinton to allow a school bus and
medical supplies to get through. Because he had the confidence of the
people in his district, he became a deputy to the National Assembly of
Popular Power.

Raúl’s son Joel, who is an electrical engineer by training, is also
very much a man of the people. At the same time, he is a wide-ranging
reader and deeply thoughtful intellectual. With a permanent cigarette
in hand and wild mane of curly hair, Joel talks affectionately about
his good friends from the ranks of revolutions around the continent
and beyond—their sacrifices and their hopes. However, he constantly
weaves these stories into larger reflections drawn from his reading.

What Joel most wishes to impress on me is that revolutionary
transformation cannot do without revolutionary subjectivity and
therefore cannot leave aside the question of religion. For many people
around the world, especially in Latin America, religion orients their
lives; it is central to their lived experience. Hence, it would be an
error for revolutionary leadership and governments—potentially a
grave one in certain contexts—to set aside religion and other
spiritual impulses as merely private matters.

In fact, as Joel points out, there are basic features of even
ostensibly secular revolutionary subjectivity—such as the idealistic
fervor that motivated people to cut sugarcane for the Revolution in
the 1960s—that operate on a terrain that is crisscrossed by both
religion and revolution. He also notes that the Cuban Revolution
inspired almost religious sacrifices in its internationalist
endeavors, even as it invoked concepts of the promised land,
transcendental hope, and expectations of a better future that are
typical of religious subjectivity.

Recent developments in Latin America, especially the rise of Christian
fundamentalism, seem to offer vivid proof of Joel’s thesis about the
need to attend to subjective consciousness as it develops in the
religious sphere. The fundamentalist evangelical churches, which are
spreading like wildfire across the continent, offer escape, ecstasy,
and the promise of community. But along with these often-illusory
promises usually come the hardened figures of patriarchy, submission,
conformity, and conservative politicization.

The fundamentalist evangelical sector reared its head as a political
force in Cuba when, in the wake of the 2019 constitution, a new Family
Code came up for debate, prior to a plebiscite. The evangelical
churches took to promoting the “original family”—mom, dad, and
kids—by holding meetings on street corners and distributing posters
that depicted their ideal household. Only the hard work of the Center,
with its popular education practices, made it possible for the
progressive rights promoted by Cuba’s LGBTQ+ and feminist groups to
be understood by the masses as those that best served their own
interests. This work contributed to the approval of a 2022 Family Code
that defends those rights, which include same-sex marriage.

This was one battle that was won, and it served as a testing ground
for the Center’s combination of spiritual and moral energy and
community-oriented praxis. Now there are more battles to come. In the
cultural struggle for the future of Cuba that is taking place in the
present, one can see both light and shadows. The most troubling
development is that a capitalist-inspired culture of radical
individualism and success is entering the social base with force.
These attitudes could undermine the revolutionary subjectivity of the
masses, thereby eroding the popular power that is a key pillar of the
Revolution’s anti-imperialism and socialism.

On the other hand, sixty-six years of revolutionary experience have
left Cuba with huge reserves of social solidarity and anti-imperialist
commitment in the bases. The work of the MLK Center in popular
education and community organizing shows that this legacy of
revolutionary subjectivity can still be tapped and also rekindled. The
struggle is ultimately for people’s hearts and minds, and for the
Revolution itself. As Fidel said, a revolution is the child of culture
and ideas—and so is its continuity.

 

_Chris Gilbert is professor of political science in the Universidad
Bolivariana de Venezuela._

_Monthly Review began publication in New York City in May 1949. The
first issue featured the lead article __“Why Socialism?”_
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* Cuban Revolution
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* Liberation Theology
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* Martin Luther King Jr.
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* Jose Marti
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* Spirituality
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