Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18I began to attend church services and was baptized five months later. A visiting preacher challenged us to use the new life God had given us. I said I wanted to become a pastor. Although I was almost completely illiterate, I passed the entrance exam to enter seminary at seventeen, with the help of the preacher and his wife. The seminary was sponsored by Southern Bap- tists, so almost all my professors were from the United States. Through their influence, I began to adopt a new outlook. I wasn’t interested in what was happening in Cuban society, politics, and economics because the professors weren’t interested. Then in January 1959, while I was still in seminary, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces ousted US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. That was something one couldn’t ignore. I became interested in what the new government was doing to benefit the poorest and most disadvantaged. My wife Clara and I served as pastors in Colón for nine years. I was not of age for military service, but while we were there, I was drafted to the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP). Despite its name, this wasn’t really military service, but rather a system of forced agricultural labor camps for Christians, criminals, conscien- tious objectors to military service, homosexual men, and anyone else the revolutionaries labeled perverse. That experi- ence taught me that even though I had no pulpit or church, I did not cease to be a Chris- tian pastor. In 1968, the government ended the UMAP system, and I returned home to Clara, my son Joel, and my newborn daughter Raquel. Although many Christians fled the country, Clara and I saw that the revolution did accom- plish many good things. We couldn’t condemn it wholesale and flee; we had to find ways to address the bad things we saw. The life of a Above, Raúl Suárez in his church in Havana Photograph by Antonio Ribeiro / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images