The Cuban communist regime released imprisoned Evangelical pastor Luis Guillermo Borjas from custody this weekend, but not before the pastor reportedly converted five people behind bars.
Borjas and wife, Roxana Rojas, were detained for presenting medical evidence to exempt their son from compulsory military service, Cuba-focused outlets reported. While the couple are no longer imprisoned, both are reportedly scheduled for trial in a Cuban military court on June 9 on “contempt” and “disobedience” charges.
The couple are Evangelical pastors from the Assemblies of God church from Mella Vaqueros, Isla de la Juventud. Their son, Kevin Lay Laurencio Rojas, is presently facing a military trial on charges of desertion after he fled the communist regime’s compulsory military service. Human rights activists have consistently denounced Cuba’s compulsory military service as needlessly tortuous, citing several high-profile soldiers’ suicides.
Borjas and Rojas were detained on May 19 and accused of contempt of court and disobedience to authority for defending their son during a valid Cuban legal proceeding. The “disobedient” behavior was reportedly the presentation of evidence at a trial – confirming that Laurencio Rojas suffers from psychiatric disorders and is therefore unfit for military service.
According to Diario de Cuba, the court claimed that the arguments espoused by the couple were “not true,” to which the pastors responded that it was “incorrect to call the witnesses liars.”
Borjas reportedly told the regime prosecutor that they were acting unjustly and that they “would have to face God’s justice.” In response, the prosecutor cited an alleged article which forbids speaking about “God or God’s justice” because Castro regime’s judicial system “were there to do justice.”
Martí Noticias reported the initial three-year sentence Laurencio Rojas faced was raised to four years after his parents protested. Borjas and Rojas face up to eight years in prison in the upcoming June trial. Rojas, who suffers from a heart-related condition, was released last week and hospitalized after she had a pericardial effusion caused by elevated blood pressure during her son’s trial.
Cuba’s Assemblies of God announced Saturday that pastor Borjas was released from prison that day, thanking everyone who expressed their solidarity to the church and the pastor while hoping for a definitive solution to the case.
Borjas and Rojas published a video on social media shortly after the pastor was released on Saturday thanking God and everyone for their prayers. Rojas reasoned that God put him in prison “to preach” and stressed that, although his faith “diminished” at a certain time, “God was glorified in young people and five souls were converted to the glory of God.”
On Friday, the Patmos Institute, a Cuban pro-human rights and religious freedom non-government organization, published a joint statement from the Cuban Alliance of Non-Registered Churches expressing solidarity with the Assemblies of God and the two pastors. The statement also identified their son, Kevin Lay Laurerio Rojas, as a victim of a biased judicial process.
The alliance, which represents a collective of congregations with no official legal status in Cuba, denounced the Castro regime’s decades-long religious persecution. Among the historical cases cited in its statement was the internment of religious and other “anti-social” or “undesirable” individuals in Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP) slave camps in 1965. More recently, the alliance noted the arrest and sentencing of Christian Evangelical Pastor Ramón Rigal and his wife, Ayda Expósito, in 2019 for homeschooling their children.
“This arbitrary way of acting against Cuban religious leaders unfortunately does not constitute a misunderstanding or an isolated or exceptional event, unfortunately it is consistent with the line held by the bad government that has ruled Cuba for almost seven decades,” the statement read, before quoting Romans 13:3. “But those in Cuba do precisely the opposite, receiving their authority not from God but from the Communist Party and the one who inspires it.”
The statement concluded by appealing to God, stressing that there are no fair and impartial courts in Cuba since those that exist are at the service of the Communist Party.
The communist Castro regime demands that all Cuban men between ages of 18 and 28 serve two years of compulsory military service. Cuban men have denounced for years that the compulsory conscription is akin to a prison “sentence” in which they are subjected to abuse, mistreatment, and extreme repressive circumstances during the service. Many young Cuban men either commit suicide to escape from the inhumane conditions or face depression or other mental health issues.
The regime imposes steep punishment such as prison sentences and fines on those who evade the compulsory service or on anyone over the age of 16 that “impedes, incites, hinders or helps to evade the fulfillment” of the compulsory conscription, which the communist regime describes as “duties with the defense of the homeland.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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