Cuba Celebrates Three Decades of Martin Luther King Memorial Center

The Martin Luther King Memorial Center is celebrating its 30th anniversary today with a marked work of social transformation and space for the promotion of ecumenism values and the Cuban socialism.

The center has maintained the community work and inside the churches for three decades, 'applying what Fidel asked us to live a gospel committed to the reality and the Cuban socialist project,' Reverend Raul Suarez, director of that center, told Prensa Latina.

The Liberation Theology and the popular, critical, liberating and contextualized education were the main idea of the work of the center for Christian inspiration during these three decades, he said.

Suarez and his wife, Clara Rodes, promoted the idea of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Marianao, Havana, founded on March 29th, 1947, and laid in 1985 the foundation stone of what would be the Martin Luther King Memorial Center two years later.

They also include programs using the theory of Popular Education by Brazilian Paulo Freire.

The Martin Luther King Memorial Center also emerged as part of the struggles and resistance in Latin America and the Caribbean and has become a reference for many regional processes.

The 70th anniversary of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Marianao, Havana, mother of the center, and the fifth anniversary of the Ecumenical Faith Network for Cuba, made up of members of ecclesial communities committed to ecumenism and the construction of the Cuban social project from faith, are being celebrated this year.