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By Bobby Ross Jr. | Religion Unplugged

LIMONAR, Cuba — It’s a tough time for Christian farmer Jorge Sánchez.

A U.S. blockade on oil shipments to this Caribbean island nation has spurred Cuba’s deepening humanitarian crisis.

“People are worried a lot about the stuff that they have to add to their crops, like insecticides, because they can’t find it,” Sánchez told me, speaking through a Spanish-language translator.

But Sánchez relies on a special means of keeping the bugs away.

“I do pest control at night,” he said. “What I do is, I come and pray in my fields, and God takes care of all of that stuff.”

Sánchez grows beans, onions, plantains, sweet potatoes, tomatoes and other vegetables at a church-operated farm about 20 miles south of the provincial capital of Matanzas in west-central Cuba.

The 17-year-old farm started small and grew after Tony Fernandez, longtime minister for the Versalles Church of Christ in Matanzas, baptized a rural couple.

The couple had lost two adult sons — one in a bicycle accident and another who died by suicide.

Jorge Sánchez, the couple’s third son, was “living a wild life of drinking and chasing women,” the minister recalled when I first visited the farm a few years ago.

But like his parents, Sánchez became a devoted Christian.

Read the full column.

This column appears in the online magazine Religion Unplugged.

Photo by Candice Pinzón