Pastor imprisoned in Cuba for prayer event while daughter is in hospital
A Protestant pastor is in prison in Cuba’s Camagüey province after state security agents arrested him on Sept. 26 and charged him with disobedience over a public prayer event he had planned.
Maikel Pupo Velázquez is held at La Cerámica Roja Prison outside Camagüey City, the United Kingdom-based group Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) reported.
Agents of Cuba’s Department of State Security (DSE) held him at their local headquarters for nine days with no outside contact before the transfer.
CSW said the charge was a reprisal for his effort to organize the gathering and called the detention arbitrary. His wife was not told of the arrest and learned of it only after the pastor’s stepfather went to where he was being held.
Pupo Velázquez leads an unregistered congregation, the Sacred Blessing Word of Fire Church. Officials summoned him on Sept. 25 and ordered him to stay away from Cándido Gonzalez Morales Stadium, the planned venue. They said he would go to jail if anyone gathered there.
Sources told CSW he answered the summons in person and then called the event off. Worried that some young people had not heard, he went to the stadium to send them home. Officers from the DSE’s Technical Investigations Department rode up on a motorcycle and took him into custody near the gates.
Authorities had detained the pastor before, in July 2025, after he tried to bring medicine and other supplies to relatives of two political prisoners.
Many young people converted to Christianity at a youth event he led in late August, and more than 20 of them then held nightly prayer meetings at the church for a month.
Relatives said his 16-year-old daughter is being treated in the heart ward at Eduardo Agramonte Piña Pediatric Hospital.
Anna Lee Stangl, CSW’s director of advocacy and head of its Americas team, demanded the pastor's immediate release. She said he was obeying a government order to cancel the event when he was detained and that state security had no rational grounds to hold him for urging fellow believers to pray for Cuba.
"There is no rational justification for the decision of the Department of State Security to detain him for simply encouraging others of his faith to pray for Cuba," she said. "To prevent any communication with his wife, even as their teenage daughter is in hospital, is inhumane. We call on the international community to join us in urging the Cuban government to free him and drop all charges against him."
In another case involving a pastor’s family, Jonathan David Muir Burgos, a teenager whose mother and father are both Protestant pastors, was released in June after spending more than three months in an adult maximum-security prison.
Jonathan, then 16, and his father, Elier Muir Avila, an Evangelical pastor, were arrested on March 16 after joining protests. The two turned themselves in after a police summons. The father went home that day, while Jonathan was charged with sabotage, an offense punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
His family said he suffered psychological and physical torture at Canaleta Prison. His mother, Minervina Burgos Lopez, also a pastor, said guards denied him proper care for dyshidrosis, a skin disease, and that he developed bacterial infections, malnutrition, depression and fainting spells.
