Ernesto Ricardo Medina began filming short videos with friends in early 2024 from a small room, or cuartico, of his home in Holguín, Cuba. By 2026, he had become one of the foremost Christian voices speaking out against the Cuban government.
“Jesus is Lord, not the Communist Party of Cuba,” Medina declares at the beginning of a January 26 video posted from his Instagram account @el4tico, short for cuartico. Behind Medina, “Dios es el Señor” (“God is the Lord”) is scrawled on the chalkboard in his iconic makeshift studio. To his right sits an old Russian desk fan that turns but doesn’t blow air with a pair of sunglasses perched on its unmoving blades—a metaphor for the futility of the Cuban state.
“They’ve taken everything from us—food, health, hope. They’ve even taken our own self-respect,” Medina continues, encouraging his Cuban compatriots to throw off fear, speak the truth, and “begin to live as if your life means more than just obedience.”
Nearly 70,000 people liked the video. Eleven days later, on February 6, authorities arrested 32-year-old Medina and his filming partner Kamil Zayas Pérez for “crimes of propaganda against the constitutional order and incitement to commit crimes.” They remain in custody even as calls to #freeel4tico reverberate across social media.
In early April, Medina managed to smuggle out a message to his fellow Cuban Christians written on sheets of toilet paper.
“I deeply long for my freedom, but I know that this is an opportunity the Father has given me so that he may be glorified in me,” Medina wrote. “He is the God of all comfort, and although the pain has been greater than I ever imagined, his presence has been even greater.”
Though threatened and detained, Cuban Christian influencers like Medina have used social media as a tool in recent years to proclaim Christ and push for freedom. Their words echo across YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, and X posts, with messages like “I am a Christian and anticommunist,” “Liberty for Cuba now!” and “Down with the dictatorship!”
Combined, Cuban influencers Ivan Daniel Navarro, David Espinosa, and Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente have hundreds of thousands of followers. Never before has the antisocialist message, a topic banned in libraries and universities, been so influential and accessible in the country, said Yoe Suárez, an exiled Christian Cuban journalist and analyst at the Family Research Council. Suárez pioneered independent journalism in Cuba, resulting in government harassment and eventual exile to the US.
“These evangelical influencers are the most influential independent political voices in Cuba today,” Suárez said.
Yet their truth-telling comes at a high cost in Cuba, an authoritarian state where churches are heavily regulated and speech against the government is illegal. In a recent interview, Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel claimed no political prisoners exist on the island and that Cubans are free to protest. Reality proves otherwise. Online dissenters face intimidation, interrogations, arrest, surveillance, and threats of job loss or detention in prisons known for human rights abuses.
The current online Christian resistance movement is a crystallization of several factors, according to Suárez, including the authorization of home internet in 2017 and the introduction of 3G internet access for mobile phones a year later. Suárez said he believes the regime saw a financial boon in selling expensive mobile phone data, not realizing it would provide Cubans with an outlet to speak freely about their frustrations.
Furthermore, in the past decade, evangelical Christians have increasingly stepped into political activism, starting with the Evangelical Civic Movement in 2018 and continuing with the July 11 protests three years later. Also called “11J,” these post-COVID-19 demonstrations brought together thousands of Cubans as they marched peacefully for increased liberties and economic relief. The Cuban government responded with a violent crackdown and arrested more than 700 protestors, including evangelical pastors and church members.
For many years, the catchphrase Los Cristianos no se meten en política (“Christians don’t get involved in politics”) defined the church’s role in society. This philosophy, Suárez said, is a tool the regime uses to prevent “the sleeping giant” of the church from waking up.
Ivan Daniel Navarro, a 22-year-old audiovisual producer, originally began his YouTube channel Voz de Verdad (Voice of Truth) in 2018 because he wanted to share the gospel with other young people in Cuba. It was never his intention to get involved in politics, Navarro said, but “the injustices and the situation in Cuba compelled me to speak out.”
After becoming more politically vocal, the police summoned him to the station in 2023, where they interrogated him and threatened him with prison time for criticizing the government. In late March, Navarro and his wife left the country to take political refuge in Spain.
“Our mission is to preach the gospel and make disciples,” Navarro said. “Remaining silent and turning a blind eye to injustice is the very opposite of the gospel.”
Many Christian political dissidents, like Navarro and Suárez, have fled Cuba. Those who stay do so either because they feel the Lord has called them to remain or because a legal exit path doesn’t exist. Either way, they face the constant risk of repercussions from Cuban State Security.
David Espinosa, 38, first created a Facebook account in 2014. At the time, the only way to access the web was through hotel internet at a costly hourly fee. An audiovisual producer at Havana’s Calvary Baptist Church, Espinosa said his initial purpose was to publish evangelical content; but like Navarro, he couldn’t stay silent about politics.
“I’ve had to use whatever I have on hand to somehow speak out against these wrongdoings,” Espinosa said. “For a while now, with a lot of caution, I’ve been trying to speak out and proclaim that the truth is Jesus Christ, the truth of the gospel, the truth of the Bible, and the wrongs our leaders are doing and the injustices that are being committed.”
Authorities have often summoned Espinosa to the police station, including most recently on April 13, when police interrogated him for nearly two and a half hours. They fined him 3,000 Cuban pesos ($125 USD), threatened him with prison, told him his children’s safety was at risk, and warned him his filming equipment would be confiscated, all to persuade him to stop publishing content online.
While Espinosa is certain he’s doing the right thing, depression and fear are, at times, also part of the struggle. He said he fought depression much of last year.
“There are a lot of times I’ve felt afraid,” Espinosa said. “I have three children, and I want to see them grow up.”
Espinosa said some Christians still don’t support what he’s doing, calling him zelote (zealot), apedreador (someone who throws stones), and a false Christian. But far greater in number are the Christians who do support him, Espinosa said. His pastors, family members, and even strangers from across Cuba send him messages saying they are with him and praying for him. These words of encouragement, he said, are what keep him going.
“God has given us the responsibility to speak the truth and share his Word,” Espinosa said. “It’s been hard and it’s dangerous, but we know that God is with us, and that’s why we’re doing it.”
Twenty-year-old Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente, also known as Anna Bensi, became an overnight sensation in October 2025 when she posted a video citing the Cuban constitution and drawing attention to the basic rights many Cubans lack. Her platform changed from humorous sketches to videos calling for the dismantling of the dictatorship.
On March 10, the Cuban police served Bensi’s mother, Caridad Silvente, with a summons to present herself at the police station the following day. They gave no reason why. Caridad Silvente filmed the encounter, which Bensi uploaded to her social media channels, saying, “I’m not afraid of them. They don’t intimidate me. And above all, they won’t silence me.”
The next day, Espinosa, Navarro, and others drove across the city to the Alamar police station in Havana for Silvente’s interrogation, praying and waiting for her outside. According to Bensi, Cuban state security tried to convince Silvente that her daughter was a mercenary, a homosexual, and that an outside actor paid her to post content. Police also charged Silvente with “exposing a government official” for filming the state officers the day before. They threatened her with five years of prison time, forbade her to leave the country, and put her under house arrest.
Two weeks later, authorities called Bensi to the police department, where they charged her with the same infraction as her mother and also placed her under house arrest. In a video detailing the police questioning to followers, she closed by saying, “No matter what happens, even though they want to hurt us, they want to do wrong to us, everything will be for our good. Amen.”
Anna continues to upload content despite being confined to her home, including calls to #freeel4ico and a previously filmed music video called “Mi Tierra,” a melancholy Latin folk ballad pleading for the healing of her homeland.
Further complicating the difficulties these Christians face is the Trump administration’s recent oil blockade of the country, which has weakened an already struggling country. Gas prices skyrocketed, trash piled up in the streets, failing public transportation systems left citizens stranded, and food spoiled in refrigerators due to rolling blackouts.
Just like their fellow Cubans, Espinosa, Bensi, and Navarro are struggling to obtain basic necessities—and in their cases, to continue uploading content.
For a day after Silvente’s interrogation, lack of cellphone connection prevented her and Bensi from communicating with the outside world. A week later, they experienced a 30-hour blackout. Though power and cell service outages are on the rise due to the oil blockade, the Cuban state is also known to intentionally cause blackouts “to prevent people from organizing or sharing evidence of human rights abuses,” according to Amnesty International.
On April 9, Bensi woke up to discover she was locked out of her WhatsApp account, the primary form of communication for many Cubans. Other Cubans speaking out against the government have experienced the same, including Espinosa and Medina’s wife, Doris Batista. Espinosa said in a post that he constantly finds himself without phone service and suspects Cuba’s state-run telecommunications company of trying “to prevent what I say from reaching far and wide.”
Despite the physical dangers, political challenges, and practical obstacles, Medina, Espinosa, Navarro, Bensi, and many other Cuban Christians refuse to stop speaking out.
“I know even more surely that the truth doesn’t need mobile data to make its way,” Espinosa said at the end of the same post. “And when a child of God is blocked, the Lord himself often opens up paths in ways that no one can even begin to understand. I won’t stop speaking out about what I’ve seen and heard. My loyalty is to the Lord, not to men.”
The post Facing Arrest, Cuban Christian Influencers Continue Call for Freedom appeared first on Christianity Today.