Pastors for Castro
Fidel’s missionaries.

By Ross Douthat, NRO
July 16, 2001 9:05 a.m.

his month, as they have for a dozen years now, an obscure organization known as the Pastors for Peace will travel south to Texas, cross the border with Mexico, and then take ship for Cuba. They will be carrying with them medical supplies, computers, athletic equipment, school supplies, and monetary donations, in what is billed as the 12th Annual U.S.-Cuba "Friendshipment."

The whole business sounds very above-board and humanitarian. In fact, it is nothing of the sort. The motto of the Pastors, and of their umbrella group, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), is "Let us love not in word: but in deed and in truth" (I John 3:18). Since their founding, in 1988, the Pastors' principle activity has been to spread the love to Fidel Castro's regime, in word and deed alike.

When six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, led by Maxine Waters of California, took a junket to Cuba in 1999, the Pastors helped organize the trip. When Castro visited New York City in 1994 and again in 2000, IFCO and the Pastors were there, welcoming him to the United States and setting up meetings between the Cuban dictator and "progressive" religious leaders. And during last year's Elian Gonzalez controversy, the Pastors were among the American groups lobbying fiercely for his return to Cuba.

Meanwhile, the Pastors' founder and executive director, the Reverend Lucius Walker, has been a reliable defender of the Castro regime's policies — and, predictably, a reliable critic of his native United States. Although "critic" might be too weak a word for a man who regularly blasts America for its "despicable evil policies," its "immoral and cowardly abuse of power," its willingness to turn black men into "an endangered species," and its "gross violations of human rights in its own country and in countries throughout this globe." All that is within a single speech — delivered to the "Second World Solidarity with Cuba Conference," held in Havana in December 2000, and attended by Castro himself.

To enter the world of Lucius Walker and his organization is to enter a place where the Cold War never ended — where the battle with the capitalist, racist, crypto-fascist United States is still being fought, one case of Yanqui imperialism at a time. The Pastors for Peace are not exactly "useful idiots," naïvely believing in some sort of moral equivalence between America and Cuba. Rather, they seem to be out-and-out Communists, trumpeting the moral superiority of Castro's regime while eagerly awaiting the coming of worldwide revolution.

This is unsurprising, given the history of the group. The IFCO was founded, according to its promotional literature, in 1967 with the aim of "advanc[ing] the struggles of oppressed people for justice and self-determination." What this meant, predictably, was backing every left-wing cause that came down the pike, from the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua (which the group judged "a powerful model for the struggle within the US against US militarism, racism, and economic exploitation") to Marxist insurrections in African nations — and including, of course, strong support for the continued "success" of the Cuban revolution.

Lucius Walker (his church, Salvation Baptist, is located in Brooklyn) was IFCO's founding director, but he left the organization in the 1970s to become Associate General Secretary of the National Council of Churches. He was fired from this position in 1978 — a turn of events that he attributed to the NCC's "'drifting to the right" — and returned to IFCO shortly thereafter. In 1988, he conceived of Pastors for Peace, now IFCO's most visible arm, as a group that would organize "humanitarian aid caravans as a way to assist the victims of US foreign policy." At first, the Pastors focused their attention on Central America, but as the Reagan-era struggles in the region began to fade (with embarrassing consequences for the Left, like the Sandinistas defeat at the polls in 1990), Walker turned the group's attention to Cuba.

And Cuba, more than anything else, has enabled IFCO and the Pastors for Peace to survive and even thrive in the post-Cold War world. Instead of having to reevaluate their politics in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, Walker and Co. point to Castro's island as the real victory for Communism, the one place where the revolution has succeeded — which explains why the hegemonic, imperialist, capitalist United States will do anything to crush the Cuban people.

As Walker put it memorably in his 2000 Havana address: "Why is the United States government so pathologically obsessed with the destruction of Cuba? I thing the answer is simple…. Cuba is a good example which capitalism cannot tolerate. What would happen if the Cuban model of development, of health care, of education, and of using its resources for the development of its own people rather than the repaying of massive, unpayable debt to the World Bank and the IMF, what if the Cuban model were copied, modified and adapted in Haiti, in Jamaica, throughout the Caribbean, Central America, South America, throughout Africa and Asia?" Why, then "the fruits of this revolution [would] flower in nation after nation until the kingdom and the imperialist powers of this world give way."

The Lord's Prayer-esque overtones of the last line remind one that Pastors for Peace is supposed to be a religious organization — and it is, sort of. The group nods to the "Judeo-Christian ethic," and over the years its backers have included left-leaning Protestant groups like the NCC and the United Methodist Church. But the Pastors acknowledge that, while they are "based in the religious community," they include "activists from all sectors of society…anyone who works with peace for justice is a 'pastor' for peace." As for their brand of Christianity, one wonders where in the New Testament the Pastors discovered that, as their mission statement puts it, one's responsibility to the community "does not mean a responsibility to charity, which can create unhealthy relationships of dependence. It means a responsibility to justice — political, social and economic." Blessed are the poor, in other words, for they shall rise up in revolution.

As they already have, if you believe the Pastors, in the worker's paradise known as Cuba. Castro's island has problems, Walker's organization admits, but they are, without exception, the result of the U.S. blockade. All else, apparently, is sweetness and light. Cuba, seen through the Red-colored glasses of this group, is actually a thriving democracy, one whose civic life would put America's to shame. As Ellen Bernstein of IFCO has insisted, "I know of no more democratic country in the world than Cuba." The Reverend Walker said the same thing in a 1999 interview, adding that "I would be honored to have a person like Fidel as President of my own country." And of course, the Florida election fiasco only added fuel to Walker's fire, as he echoed Castro in calling for Cuban "observers" to monitor American elections.

This fiction of a Cuban democracy is sustained through a naïveté that would be touching, if it weren't so horrifying. The IFCO website trumpets a 1997 book called Democracy in Cuba, by a Canadian named Arnold August, as evidence of how "the Cuban Revolution…heralded the realization of true democracy." According to August, not only does Cuba have free elections, in which one can be a candidate without even joining the Communist Party, but it also has campaign-finance-reform laws tight enough to make John McCain proud. Meanwhile, the citizenry is remarkably engaged in political life — for instance, even though voting isn't mandatory, a whopping 98 percent of the voting-age public cast ballots in the last election! And of course, the notion of Fidel Castro as a dictator is arrant nonsense — he was voted into office by the 601-member National Assembly, which in 1997-98 gave him a remarkable 100 percent of the vote!

All of this is reported without a trace of irony. So it is no surprise that Cuban dissidents receive short shrift from the Pastors for Peace — after all, how could one dissent from such a marvelously vibrant democratic society? While the Pastors have kind words for countless "political prisoners," like cop-killing radio journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and Shining Path abettor Lori Berenson, they make no mention of people like Rene Montes de Oca, or Dr. Oscar Biscet, or Jose Orlando Gonzalez Bridon--all of whom languish in Castro's jail for daring to ask for a political system in which a candidate might receive slightly less than 100 percent of the vote.

But at least, one might argue, the Pastors are doing some much-needed charity work, lugging medical supplies to needy Cubans. Here again, though, the reality is murkier. Even if one discounts the (all too believable) reports that many of the medical supplies turn up later in Castro's government-run "foreigners-only" stores, the "Friendshipment" caravans still smack of political opportunism. After all, one wonders, why lug the supplies through Mexico, when all such purely humanitarian aid can be shipped directly to Cuba simply by acquiring a Treasury Department license?

The answer, according to IFCO, is that they refuse to "participate in [the] immoral laws and regulations" associated with the U.S. embargo. More to the point, repeatedly violating U.S. customs law by crossing the Mexican border with unlicensed supplies for Cuba provokes confrontations with the government — which in turn leads to publicity for the Pastors.

As Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy reported in April 1999, Walker's group got just the reaction they were looking for during their '96 pilgrimage, when "a 30-vehicle caravan carrying 200 activists and 300 computers was blocked at the Mexican border south of San Diego by U.S. Customs officers." In response, Tooley wrote, "Pastors for Peace activists dismounted from their vehicles and began running their computers towards the border, trying to ram through Customs officials and police officers…. The melee injured one protester and four Customs inspectors, three of whom required hospital treatment. According to Pastors for Peace, their activists had been trained in 'non-violent techniques.' Walker later said he had never seen law enforcement behave so brutally."

In the end, the computers were confiscated by Customs, which prompted Walker to begin a hunger strike — which, in turn, brought Walker's congressman, Charlie Rangel, into the fray. According to Tooley's report, Rangel, accompanied by several other Democratic House members and Joan Brown Campbell of the NCC, praised the Pastors as "dedicated Americans…working to ease the suffering of the Cuban people," and announced the support of 60 members of the House for the return of the computers to the Pastors. Eventually, the Treasury Department gave in, and since then there have been no further attempts to halt Walker's caravans — much to his disappointment, no doubt.

Still, there are other avenues for publicity. The Pastors and IFCO made hay out of the Elian affair, for instance, organizing a conference at New York's Hunter College and causing a stir by barring anti-Castro speakers from attending. While Cuban émigrés were kept out by the campus police, the Pastors' panelists held forth: Cuban diplomats testified to Castro's beneficence, fellow travelers like ex-attorney general Ramsay Clark blasted U.S. policy, and Walker attacked the Cuban-American exiles protesting outside as gusanos, or worms, a term favored by Castro to describe political dissenters.

By this point, the Pastors are a well-established cog in the left-of-left political machine — they have funding from left-wing philanthropies like the Arca Foundation (which supplied the cash for the Black Caucus trip to Cuba), backing from an array of left-wing Democrats, and ties to all sorts of New New Left organizations. More importantly, they have self-righteous zeal to spare — and whenever someone dares to suggest that all might not be well in Communist Cuba, the Pastors are there to provide the "other side" of the story.

In many ways, the Pastors for Peace resemble their great idol, Fidel Castro. Both are relics of the Cold War, both are out of touch with Cuban reality — and both show no signs of going away.