This essay, which stems from a broader project on religion in the
nineteenth-century Hispanic Caribbean, seeks to recreate the
experiences of the thousands of Protestants who struggled
tenaciously to retain or hide their faith in colonial Cuba and Puerto Rico
before the declaration of religious tolerance in 1869 and before the
establishment of the region's first Protestant churches, the Anglican
congregation of Ponce, organised in 1869, the Episcopal mission of
Havana, started in 1871, and the Anglican congregation of Vieques, an
island located eight miles off the coast of Puerto Rico, founded in 1880.