One dream job of mine is to write travel books—preferably ones about Europe—but Rick Steves already has a corner on that market. Rick Steves doesn't cover the Caribbean, but Lonely Planet does, and I have always liked the cleverness of that name. So with a nod to Rick Steves and Lonely Planet, here's the Jim Lorenz, Lonely Pastor travel guide and commentary to Cuba. Don't worry, I will keep my day job.

I went to Cuba earlier this year by invitation of La Voz de Esperanza, the Spanish arm of the Voice of Prophecy. While there, I held a short ten-day reaping series in one of the two Seventh-day Adventist churches in Santiago de Cuba.

If you visit Cuba, go in the winter, as I did, when the temperature most days will be in the 80s. Take plenty of film—not the five or six rolls that some of my fellow travelers took with them. The cars, architecture, and people set in the colorful Spanish Caribbean are guaranteed to keep demand for film high and protect Kodak from bankruptcy.

Santiago de Cuba is much like that person at church whose name you have forgotten, but whose face you remember. Americans may remember Santiago de Cuba as the place where Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders made history on San Juan Hill and where Spain and the United States fought their last major naval engagement. It is Cuba's former capitol and the island's second largest city.

By car, Santiago de Cuba is a fourteen-hour ride from Havana, and it sits not far from Guantanamo Naval Base. It is home to the best-preserved Spanish fortress in the Caribbean and the location of Cuba's oldest house and church, both of which date back to around 1522. For Adventists with a colorful past, it is also the pre-Castro Revolution home of Barcardi Rum. More recently, it was the birthplace of the Castro revolution.

Cuba is a country of contrasts. Although it comes across as "the real thing," raw and uncommercialized, the thing that keeps it fresh also causes suffering. Nearby Caribbean islands pull in millions of tourists with their cash, but political barriers keep Cuba well off the beaten path and impoverished.

In Cuba, I sometimes felt as though I had stepped into a scene from American Graffiti. At times, the only cars around me were from the 1950s. The pastor with whom I stayed had a 1954 Ford. Another pastor in Santiago de Cuba had a 1947 Ford, which was probably not long for this world. Then again, he drives it around town at a frustratingly slow rate of ten miles per hour. Who knows? It might be around another ten years or so.

These cars and the horse carts with which they share the road have survived because of the U.S. embargo, poverty, and a government system that limits automobile ownership. Some pastors have only a bicycle.

Much of Cuba retains the beautiful architecture it had at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The look is Spanish Caribbean, with beautiful, narrow, house-lined streets—places waiting to become meccas for tourists.

Preservation of these homes has come at a price. The old homes have survived because few Cubans can afford to rebuild and the government controls construction. Newly painted houses stand out from their neighbors' flaking, peeling homes because paint is a luxury. Glass windows that keep out disease-carrying mosquitoes and the noise of street vendors' carts that start deliveries before 6 a.m. (earplugs were a blessed foresight) are also luxuries few can afford.

Although most homes have electricity, it is sometimes unpredictable. The light "switch" in our room was two wires that we connected to complete the circuit. This can be a hair-raising experience at night when fumbling to find a mosquito that flew in through the window. Did I mention that the newspaper in the bathroom may not be only for your reading pleasure?

Housing is a serious issue in Cuba. The government decides who will own which house. Thus, it is extremely difficult for Cubans to move from one city to another or even to another address in the same city. The translator for one of the churches in Santiago de Cuba discovered how complicated things can get after getting divorced from his wife. Neither of them could find separate housing afterward, so while his former wife carried on a relationship with another man she and the translator still lived under the same roof.

The Adventist Church deals with the housing shortage by moving all of its pastors every four years. Think of this arrangement as a child's game of musical chairs, where everyone stands up and exchanges seats. The conference owns the parsonages, and everyone does the shuffle.

Cuba's unofficial official currency is the U.S. dollar. In stores, prices are in dollars. In fact, they have "dollar stores" that accept no other currency. Physicians make only $25 per month, and many have to moonlight driving taxis. Durable goods costs more in Cuba than in the United States, and a one-speed blender costs $30, more than a month's salary.

Those of us from the United States tend to associate poverty with slums. In contrast, most Cubans seem to have the same low standard of living. Still, the country is neat and tidy. I visited one home in the country that had chickens walking through the clapboard house, but the floor was spotless and everything in its place. Not one house that we stopped at—even unexpectedly—was anything but neat. I didn't see one dirty car, which may be one reason those 1955 Chevys are still running.

Are some countries worse off than Cuba? Definitely. Some—like Haiti and the Dominican Republic—can even be found in the Caribbean. But it is Cuba's proximity to the United States—merely ninety miles from Miami—that makes the contrast so stark.

Although Cuba's government generally takes a hands-off approach to religion, churches cannot be built where none existed before. Stories of imprisonment and torture during the 1980s and 1990s are fresh and not uncommon. The church where I spoke could "seat" around four hundred by filling up the isles with chairs. But the congregation had nine hundred members, so most met in house churches. Half of the four hundred or so in attendance were visitors—not members.

Keep in mind that only the pastor and one or two other people in that church own cars, and getting to church was not easy, especially from outlying areas. Still, the congregation is growing. During the meetings I held, between 120 and 140 people came forward for baptism. These numbers testify to the work that members devoted to the meetings before I arrived.

Perhaps the church situation was the strongest contrast I noticed. In Cuba, where churches are few and overcrowded, have hard wooden pews, no carpeting, poor transportation, ancient audio/visual systems, and no air conditioning, congregations are growing. Contrast that situation with the United States, where we have all the amenities but no growth.

Then the contrasts end and the haunting similarities begin. As in the United States, Cuba has a shortage of pastors. If given the opportunity, many Cuban pastors leave for the United States or other more hospitable locales.

The knee-jerk reaction is to question those pastors' dedication. Why would they leave such a growing field? However, those of us who live in the United States often do the same thing. We leave churches—sometimes growing churches—to seek out more "hospitable locales." The question does not have to be whether I would take a church in Cuba, but whether I would accept a church that most people do not view favorably.

There is something haunting in that well-known line: the more things change, the more things stay the same.

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