This panel explores shifts in Latin American church-state relations through analyses of Cuban religious experience across the island and its diaspora. The panel begins by reframing the decline of Catholic affiliation in Latin America as a move toward spiritual pluralization rather than secularization, while the subsequent papers delve into the socio-political and therapeutic roles of faith in the Cuban context. Analyzing the Catholic Church’s emergence as a moral intermediary between popular discontent and authoritarian state power in Cuba from 2021 to 2026, one case highlights the Church's strategic role in humanitarian aid and resistance. Complementing this, the panel concludes with an exploration of how the Cuban diaspora in Miami utilizes the "moral ecology" of Santería and Catholicism for ritual healing and liberation from displacement-related trauma. Together, these papers illustrate how Cuban religious practices function as vital sites of agency, resistance, and healing amidst systemic crisis and migration.
The dramatic decline of Catholic affiliation in Latin America has often been interpreted as evidence of secularization. Drawing on the 2026 Pew Research Center report, this paper challenges that conclusion by arguing that the region is not becoming less religious but more religiously plural. While Catholic identification has fallen sharply across six major countries, belief in God, prayer, and supernatural worldviews remain remarkably robust—even among the religiously unaffiliated.
Rather than signaling disenchantment, these patterns suggest the collapse of Catholic monopoly and the rise of post-institutional spiritual repertoires. Integrating secularization theory, religious economy models, and lived religion frameworks, the paper contends that Latin America exemplifies a distinct form of religious modernity characterized by institutional disaffection and spiritual diversification. By reframing Catholic decline as pluralization, the study positions Latin America as a critical site for rethinking global theories of religion and modernity.
The paper analyzes the role of the Catholic Church as an intermediator between popular discontent and state power in Cuba from two perspectives. First, it analyzes how Catholic institutions in Cuba have exercised resistance to punitive state power directed at the people. Second, the paper examines the role of Catholic charities in the humanitarian crises that have unfolded in Cuba and discusses religiously motivated charity as an extended form of outreach into civil society by the Catholic Church. Overall, the paper argues that Catholic institutions have increasingly acquired moral authority and occupied a distinct role of intermediation between the people, their discontent, and punitive, authoritarian state power. They have done so by employing various forms of strategic engagement, highlighting the polyvocality and hybridity of Catholic socio-ethical presence under diverse political and social conditions.
What does it mean to heal in exile? This paper examines ritual healing among displaced Cuban communities in Miami, where Santería and Catholicism coexist not as competing doctrines but as interwoven threads of a single moral ecology. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and Latine theological ethics, I argue that ritual healing is not merely therapeutic or sacramental; it is a liberative process through which the traumatized reclaim agency over body, memory, and future. Situating the paper at the intersection of liberation theology, Afro-Cuban religious studies, and trauma theory, I draw on Gutiérrez, Isasi-Díaz, and De La Torre alongside Beliso-De Jesús’s treatment of ritual as epistemology and Lederach’s moral imagination to trace four ways Santería ritual enacts healing for the displaced: relational restoration, the holding of paradox, divine encounter, and the breaking of intergenerational trauma. Among displaced Cubans, the future is not an abstract horizon; it is ritually practiced in the present.