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By Oscar Biscet
Human Rights Leader
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Every December 10, the world marks Human Rights Day. Governments and NGOs issue statements about freedom and dignity. In my homeland of Cuba, those words sound faint against the clanging of iron doors and the quiet prayers of men and women who refuse to renounce their faith.
I know this silence. I spent nearly 12 years in Cuban prisons for defending life and liberty. My “crime” was to affirm that every human being is sacred because God created them. My cell was small and damp; light came through a crack above the door. What kept me alive was faith—not in politics or ideology, but in something deeper and higher than the Castro regime could touch.
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That conviction is the real foundation of human rights. They are not the inventions of diplomats or lawyers, but the outgrowth of an older truth: that each person bears the image of God. Before that belief took hold, life was cheap. The strong ruled the weak. Power, not justice, was the only measure of worth. Christianity changed that moral order. It taught that all people, even the poorest, the slave, and the prisoner, possess equal dignity. Later generations translated that idea into secular language, but the roots remained spiritual.
Those roots have withered in Cuba. According to Prisoners Defenders, more than 1,000 political prisoners remain on the island—including children, women and men whose health has deteriorated under harsh confinement. Nine political prisoners are currently on hunger strike. Beyond the political cases, Cuba holds around 90,000 inmates in total, giving it the second-highest incarceration rate in the world. A 2025 report by Christian Solidarity Worldwide found that a majority of religious prisoners were denied access to Bibles or other religious materials, and many were prevented from praying or holding religious meetings while incarcerated.
Beyond the prisons, religious life in Cuba is shrinking under pressure. The U.S. State Department’s 2023 International Religious Freedom Report documents harassment of pastors, confiscation of church property and threats against congregations that refuse to align with government institutions. Catholic and Protestant leaders report surveillance and travel bans; house churches are routinely denied legal recognition. The message is unmistakable: loyalty to God must yield to loyalty to the state.
The regime still claims to champion equality and social justice. Yet it denies the existence of political prisoners and calls dissenters “mercenaries.” It censors priests who speak about conscience and arrests laypeople who protest. Human Rights Watch has recorded beatings, prolonged solitary confinement and denial of medical care for those jailed after the 2021 protests. These practices reveal a government intent not only on silencing words but on erasing belief itself.
When human rights are detached from their divine source, they become fragile—granted or revoked by power. In Cuba, rights exist only as permissions from the Communist Party. A state that claims to replace God will eventually claim to define man.
Many in the West still speak eloquently of human rights, but often without the faith that sustains them. They praise the language of dignity while ignoring those who suffer for defending it. Ideals cannot survive on sentiment alone; they depend on the moral soil that first nourished them. When societies forget that, their compassion fades, and tyranny finds new justifications.
During my years in prison, I saw what faith looks like when stripped of comfort. Men who had lost everything—their families, their health, their hope—still prayed for their guards. They shared a crust of bread, whispered the Psalms through the walls, and forgave. Watching them, I learned that freedom does not begin when the cell door opens. It begins when the soul refuses to bow.
Human Rights Day should remind us of that truth. Rights are not favors granted by governments; they are reflections of a moral reality beyond politics. When a nation forgets this, it begins to measure human worth by ideology or usefulness—and cruelty soon follows.
Cuba’s crisis is not only political. It is spiritual. A people who deny God will eventually deny man. This December 10, I ask those who live in freedom to remember those who do not—the mothers, pastors and young men still behind bars for believing that conscience belongs to God alone.
Human rights without God are fragile things. When faith is silenced, freedom soon follows.
Dr. Oscar Biscet is a human rights leader, former prisoner of conscience and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He lives in Havana, Cuba.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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