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Edward A. Odell, in his study of American Presbyterian missions to the Caribbean, It Came to Pass (1952), writes of Edith McClung Houston, that she was the niece of another missionary, Janet H. Houston, who served first in Mexico and then in Cuba, and encouraged “Miss Edith” to transfer from Mexico to Cuba as well. Odell says “The author owes Miss Edith a great debt of gratitude for allowing him to draw on her writings about the early days of the Presbyterian Church U.S. with which she was so intimately associated.”
Miss Edith — originally of Lexington, Virginia — arrived in Cuba on January 8, 1900. She taught children and women, and organized a women’s presbyterial society. She wrote often for The Missionary Survey, and labored for Christ in Cuba, particularly in Cárdenas and Caibarién, through her retirement in 1938, after which she continued to live in the home of Rev. José Leiva. It is thought she entered into her eternal rest in the late 1950s.
Besides reporting on the status of missionary efforts in Cuba, she expressed herself in verse as in the poem (written in 1917) that follows.
CUBA FOR CHRIST
A pearl sends forth its gleams 'mid sapphire Seas.
'Tis Cuba radiant with perpetual spring;
Yet might she gain beauties more real than these,
For Cuba still doth lack the fairest thing.
I ask thee, then, oh friend, this prayer to Wing —
That, shining with a light not hers before,
Set in the diadem of Christ the King,
Cuba may shed her luster evermore.
May Christians today continue in prayer for Cuba to be “Set in the diadem of Christ the King.”
