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[Cover of I Will Die Free, Alexander's autobiography]

On 20 February 1962, Humberto Noble Alexander preached on the origin of evil to a large group of Cuban youth. Afterward, as he neared home, police arrested the 28-year-old Seventh-day Adventist lay pastor. The officers assured him he was wanted for just five minutes of questioning.

Five minutes became a lifetime. At one time, Alexander would become the longest held prisoner for Christ in the history of Cuba. Fidel Castro feared Christianity as an ideology that rivaled communism. His regime accused Alexander of using code words in his sermons to convey anti-communist messages, of abetting the escape of counterrevolutionaries, and of plotting to bomb Castro’s airplane.

Despite the impossibility of the bomb charge—he was already in custody on the date of the alleged bomb plot—the judge sentenced him to twenty years. Those would be years of terrible suffering in Cuban prisons. 

Afterward, Alexander would write that he often teetered on the edge of collapse. Yet again and again, God infused him with a strength that enabled him to stand firm in faith. He survived caging, beatings, sleep deprivation, gun wounds, starvation, overwork, and tortures too sadistic to repeat here. Most painful of all, his wife divorced him and raised their son as a communist. 

Alexander served as a prison pastor. Wherever he was incarcerated, he won souls and gathered men for worship. They sang hymns and shared scraps of Scripture. He and fellow prisoners opened “universities” where they taught one another whatever skills and learning they possessed. Each class was permeated with Christian teaching.

Often prisoners’ efforts to stay sane and faithful seemed hopeless. Misery followed misery day after day and night after night as guards tried to break their spirits with ingenious torments. Many stalwart Christians, after enduring years of such treatment, finally broke, denied Christ, and accepted Communist re-education rather than continue to resist and suffer in Christ’s name. 

Nonetheless, for those who stood true, God reached into their lives with what could only be called miracles. A prisoner named Balbon had become a Christian and wanted to be baptized. He was about to be transferred and did not know if there would be a prison church and someone to baptize him at his destination. The Christians prayed. One said, “If God wants Balbon baptized before being transferred, he’ll be baptized, right?”

Soon thereafter, while gathering fodder for cattle, Balbon and Alexander did not hear an order. A furious sergeant punished the pair by forcing them to wade into a lake and gather grasses with their bare hands. Alexander seized the opportunity to baptize Balbon in the cold water. A guard’s overreaction had become the means for fulfillment of a prayer request.

Alexander’s release date came and went. Two years later, through the negotiations of Jesse Jackson, Castro released several American and Cuban prisoners in 1984 as “a humanitarian gesture.” Alexander stepped off the plane a free man in Washington, D. C. on this day, 26 June, 1984. In his account of his prison experiences, I Will Die Free, Alexander spoke of the plight of the remaining Christians. Americans and Cubans who had served in prison alongside him vouched for the truth of his harrowing and triumphant account.

—Dan Graves

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For another Christian prisoner's prison harrowing story, watch Bless You, Prison

Bless You Prison can be purchased at Vision Video

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• A Modern Historian Reenacted Irish Monk Brendan's Famous Voyage
• HRABANUS MAURUS EMPLOYED HIS MIGHTY INTELLECT TO EDUCATE CHRISTIANS

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