"We feel favorably impressed by the results,” said Asseln-Keller. “It has to do with a serious work through which so many Christian and non-Christian communities benefit, both rural and urban, the which receive the accompaniment of the two institutions with which we have relationships of cooperation and projects; the Council of Churches of Cuba and the “Martin Luther King, Jr.” Memorial Center. 

This work of relationship between the German agency and the Cuban organisms goes back to1991, and it has been maintained in an uninterrupted way as a result of the seriousness with which it has been carried out up until the present time.  

"Here we have found a very lively community, with measurable benefits and, above all, professionally very well qualified to the point that the improvement of a methodology well conceived within the program of Sustainable Development, with evident results, is astonishing, where the training is an indispensable pillar of the process that is seen in the island,” Asseln-Keller pointed out. 

From the start of the so-called Special Period, at the beginnings of the 1990s, these Cuban ecumenical organisms began a series of projects having to do with the search for viable alternatives to the crisis of the country and that would allow sustainability, above all, of popular based agriculture to serve as a palliative of the crisis that marked the island, beginning with the fall of the so-called Socialist Field and the maintaining of the economic blockade on the part of the government of the United States. 

The Council of Churches of Cuba (CIC, Spanish acronym) has, in addition to a well defined program of Sustainable Development, other areas like the one attending to community health, the work with handicapped people and actions in response to unexpected situations and natural disasters, among others, and which have given to Cuban ecumenism a new social projection and accompaniment of the most vulnerable during the last decades.

Photo: Church Development Service (EED)