‘A first shelter’ - Priest’s ministry helps Cuban refugees in Spain
Meet the priest helping Cuban refugees in Spain.
In the past five years, more than one in 20 people living in Cuba has fled from the island nation in the Caribbean.
The economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has led to increased scarcity, declining salaries, and a lack of public services in the country. Meanwhile, political repression has also risen, with opponents of the communist regime facing the prospect of imprisonment or torture.
While the crisis has not attracted the international attention that surrounded Cuba in the 1990s, a quiet exodus is underway. Most of those who leave head to the United States or Spain.
In fact, today more than 200,000 Cubans live in Spain, with a large swath of them arriving in the migratory wave of the past five years.
These newcomers often reach Spain with no family or friends to receive them. Many have no idea where to go once they have arrived, or how to use the subway system, or how to navigate the government bureaucracy, or the country’s job and housing markets.
Cuban priest Fr. Bladimir Navarro, who has lived in Spain for the last five years, is making an effort to help them.
After nine years serving as a priest in Cuba, Navarro left the country in 2019 to study moral theology in Spain.
Three years later, he felt God calling him to help the many Cubans arriving in Spain, often in dire circumstances.
Navarro said that while praying one day in 2022, the words of Exodus 3, “I have witnessed the affliction of my people,” stuck in his mind.
“People in Cuba don’t live. They survive,” he told The Pillar, adding that people are not fleeing the country simply due to a lack of food or medicine, but because of a lack of freedom.
“Many Cubans tell me ‘Look Father, I lived this, I can bear it, but I don’t want this life for my children’,” he said.
“The communists like to say that people leave Cuba because Cubans are sold an American dream that is a lie. But people are not fleeing because of a dream, they are fleeing because they are in despair.”
Convinced that he needed to help, Navarro and a few friends founded Proyecto Cobijo, a foundation dedicated to receiving Cubans arriving in Spain and helping them in their first few months in the country.
The word ‘cobijo’ means ‘shelter’ in Spanish. But Navarro said the word also has a specifically Cuban dimension.
“In Cuba, a cobijo is what the peasants used to make their houses. You take a group of palms and knit them together and you get a cobijo, which is the roof for your hut. So cobijo means welcoming, home.”
In July of 2022, while collecting medicine and food to send to Cubans back home, a woman approached Navarro and said she wanted to donate an entire apartment’s worth of furniture.
When Navarro saw the apartment, he told the woman about his desire to help Cubans in Spain. She agreed, and a month later, they were able to host their first Cuban family in Spain.
Since its creation two years ago, Proyecto Cobijo has helped 1,000 Cubans arriving in Spain. The project is currently hosting 115 immigrants in its 17 apartments and houses.
In Spain, most Cubans are able to apply for humanitarian protection, which allows them to legally stay and work in the country.
But while they wait for their documents, Cuban refugees are not allowed to work legally. This makes it hard for them to pay for rent, or even food.
“We think of Cobijo as a temporary solution, a first shelter while you figure things out. We are not trying to repeat the Cuban state paternalism by which you give everything to people and make them dependent. No, Cobijo is a place to start, in which you feel safe and breathe a little bit for three, six months so that then you can ‘fly’ by yourself,” Navarro said.
“If not, we would be repeating a vicious cycle,” he added.
However, Navarro believes that the most important support provided by Cobijo is not economic, but spiritual and psychological.
“How does a Cuban arrive in Spain? Absolutely broken. It’s people who have left everything and lost everything - their house, their land, their family, their customs, everything. It’s true, living in a country like this is a privilege, but it’s not like back home. It’s difficult…Even the simplest things can become overwhelming,” he said.
“Also, people are emotionally broken, some people leave their children behind, some are doctors back home and here end up cleaning houses,” he continued.
In addition, many people come with “an anthropological wound” from their life in Cuba, he said.
“I remember when I was a kid that when we ate beef or fish, my mom told me not to tell anyone in school. Doctors have to steal alcohol or syringes and re-sell them to make ends meet. So, people live out of lies to survive, which causes a strong moral, human, and anthropological wound that is very hard, but can be healed.”
Many of the Cubans who arrive in Spain also bear wounds from the harrowing journey, which in most cases involves flying first to Russia – the only European country that does not require Cubans to have a visa in order to enter its territory – before starting a grueling trip involving human traffickers and many other dangers.
“Some people have enough money to continue the journey right away, but others stay in Russia for a few months, working illegally to make enough money to start traveling – at the hands of traffickers – until they reach Greece, and finally are in EU territory,” Navarro said.
“The trip usually takes months and has many risks: You can get robbed, raped, or kidnapped. Many Cubans lose their passports in internment camps in Bosnia. Most of them arrive in Spain with hefty debts. They ask for money from their family members who are already in Europe or in the U.S. Some come here with over 10,000 euros in debt.”
He recalled one family that arrived at the train station in Madrid. He sent a cab to pick them up, but they were afraid they were going to be raped or kidnapped to have their organs harvested.
“Most people coming are naturally distrustful or anxious because of their experiences back home and during the journey here,” he said.
Part of the goal with Cobijo is to help people heal.
“We receive people like this, broken, which is why we’re inspired in the parable of the Good Samaritan,” Navarro explained. “Scripture inspires us to not leave anyone behind, and that is why we call our benefactors ‘good Samaritans’ and not donors or any other term. It’s people giving their time, their money to take others on their shoulders and help them prosper.”
Providing for the temporal needs of the Cuban refugees has also borne spiritual fruits, Navarro said.
“This June, a group of Cubans was baptized here in the parish, and many others also did their first communion or confirmation. Others had received the sacraments as children but had fallen out of the faith and rediscovered it here,” he said.
Although Cuba was a traditionally Catholic country, 60 years of communism and anti-religious sentiment have left an imprint on the island.
The nation was officially atheist until the late ‘80s, and children are educated in communist and materialist values.
Therefore, although Catholicism is still strongly present in Cuban imagery, religious practice is low and many Cubans are not even baptized.
“It’s true, state atheism has had an effect on education and what people believe. But people see they need to hold on to something or, better said, to Someone. That way, they can restart their lives. I think they see that we in Cobijo are people of faith, that we are joyfully living with God, and also want that. This is also a way to evangelize, through our testimony, by welcoming people.”
“When you show people God’s mercy in such a practical way, they see Christ behind it.”
For Navarro, the tension between communism and Catholicism has played out in his own life.
His first name - Bladimir - is a common name in Cuba, as a homage to Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the USSR.
Born in 1982 to atheist parents who later divorced, Navarro said his family was largely non-religious.
“I remember my grandmother practiced religious syncretism of santeria and spiritism, but that was pretty much it,” he said.
The priest said his father is still a convicted Marxist to this day, and his mother used to be a communist.
When he was nine years old, a neighboring child invited him to Christmas Mass. It was his first time setting foot in a church, and he didn’t tell his parents.
He was asked to be one of the wise men in the church’s Christmas play, which he loved. He started going back each week, and a year later, he made the decision to be baptized.
Navarro’s faith was challenged in high school, when he faced what he described as “communist indoctrination.”
“When I was 15 years old, me and other Catholic friends formed a group to strengthen each other in the faith,” he said. “Two of the leaders of the group were expelled when they discovered us. They also wanted to expel me, but my grandmother went to defend me and said I shouldn’t be expelled because I had good grades, and I was allowed to continue my studies.”
Navarro believes that living the faith under pressure strengthened him as a Catholic and helped him to “see things clearly.”
“The school did not allow any religious activities, but we met to read Scripture and pray the Liturgy of the Hours. Every now and then religious sisters and priests came –without habit or cassock– saying they were family members coming to visit us,” he said.
“They came and gave us spiritual talks, spiritual direction, confession, and we celebrated the Eucharist. We even had almost 80 students at one point in the group.”
Eventually, Navarro said, the religious persecution surrounding him helped him recognize his vocation to the priesthood. And it prepared him for the nine years he spent as a parish priest in Cuba after his 2011 ordination.
“You want to do things for the Kingdom but you have to do them behind the communists’ backs. For example, the church cannot own any property, so if you wanted to build a soup kitchen, it had to be officially in the name of a parishioner,” he said. “We also bought a house and turned it into a school that over 300 children attended, so they could study English, French, computer science, and more.”
“However, this made the communists uneasy. So they started putting spies on me to see what I did, what I said in my homilies, and even infiltrated people in the parish to sow division. So I eventually asked my bishop to leave temporarily.”
Though he has been out of the country for five years, Navarro hopes to return to Cuba one day.
“Cobijo will end when communism ends in Cuba. We will return. I always tell all the people who have been helped by Cobijo that we have to return to restore Cuba. Cobijo has three verbs: to receive, to transform, and to send. And we’re sent to receive another Cuban,” he said.
“When people start having better lives in Spain, sometimes they return wanting to give me money for the help we gave them, and I always tell them what the Lord tells us at the end of the Parable of the Good Samaritan: Go and do likewise. Plan to go back eventually and restore Cuba.”
“Spain is our old homeland, the Madre Patria, as we say, but in the end it is a strange land. It is an exile. So, you need to build up communities so people can be socially integrated. Eventually, we will return,” he said.
“But we need to return as a dynamic, hopeful, joyful and resilient people.”
Thank you for this story. I had no idea so many Cubans were refugees.
Incredible story, I had the privilege of getting to know several people--fellow seminarians, professors and formators--in seminary who had fled Cuba. God bless this incredible ministry!