Spring 2025 Mission Trip

Without question, the Spring 2025 mission trip was the most advanced to date! We had a team of 9, including four board members who are experienced missionaries, an American Catholic, three Cuban Catholics and a Cuban evangelical:

·      met with the Cardinal Archbishop of Havana, the Bishop of Pinar del Rio, several priests and other pastoral ministers;

·      visited and prayed with three communities of the Missionaries of Charity and the poor and sick they had gathered, two evangelical communities, and one of the Bridgettine Sisters;

·      led a daylong retreat for married couples;

·      preached, taught and prayed over hundreds of people for the Holy Spirit and for healing and saw scores healed including complete relief for a Missionary of Charity and two Bridgettine Sisters;

·      and, distributed over $5,000 and over 200 pounds of food, vitamins and medicines to various ministries.

This was the 11th mission trip since I came to Cuba for the first time in 2012 for the visit of Pope Benedict. On that trip, I brought religious medals of Our Lady of Charity to distribute as well as helped bring in some clothing items. I did not see it then primarily as a mission trip, but as a trip to experience Cuba for the first time and to accompany my mother to Cuba 51 years after she left to come to the United States as a refugee. On that trip, though, God surprised me and planted a seed in my heart to do something to help the people of Cuba. By the following year, I had discerned a calling to be a missionary deacon to places like Cuba, India and the Holy Land. With the blessing of my bishop for this ministry, I began formation in a diaconate program in 2014 and was ordained in 2018. In 2021, after 33 years, I retired from full time ministry in my home diocese in order to focus on a mission to Cuba. Due to Covid restrictions, I was not able to travel there until January of 2022. I stayed for a month primarily in El Cobre, but also in Santiago and Havana, accompanied by a young man who was discerning his own mission call in life.

I begin with this retrospective in order to highlight that from the beginning, this ministry, which is now known as MorningStar.Charity, has been a work of God. It’s His ministry. Over and over, I have had to learn how to distinguish what are just my own ideas about what might be good to do in the future, from God’s perfect ideas about what needs to be done now. One thing that He has shown me in these three and a half years is that this ministry is built upon deepening and expanding personal friendships and that I don’t need to come up with a plan for Cuba. God has a plan for Cuba. In fact, He has a plan for every nation. MorningStar.Charity is committed to doing those things — and only those things — that we believe He has set aside for this ministry to do; and, since the rest is in His hands and on His shoulders, we focus not on the suffering and what is lacking, but rather on the gratitude and joy in seeing the fruit of His work!

Deacon Fred Everett, President of MorningStar.Charity