Awaiting Miracles : Former Bodybuilder Brings Faith Healing to Latino Community

Yiye Avila, a Puerto Rican bodybuilding champion turned evangelist, paced feverishly, microphone in hand, across the artificial turf nailed to the makeshift stage at the 50-yard line of the East Los Angeles College football stadium.

In a giant huddle at his feet--under a scoreboard that announced “Christo Viene” (Christ Is Coming)--nearly 1,000 ailing believers had gathered, some in wheelchairs, some on crutches, some with just hernias or hemorrhoids. Others were said to be dying from cancer, from heart disease, from AIDS.

Then, like a conductor who knows how to milk every last drop of emotion from his orchestra, the charismatic 63-year-old faith-healer closed his eyes, clenched his fists and pleaded for miracles to heal his followers.

“Aleluyah. . . . Gracias, Jesus. . . . Gloria a Dios,” he boomed in Spanish, crackling the public address speakers and unleashing a deafening cacophony of groans, moans, sobs and the indecipherable babble of tongues.

“Glory to God. Out with the devil. In the name of Christ, be hea-ea-ealed.”

It is a scene that by Sunday will have been repeated 14 consecutive evenings at the Monterey Park stadium, where, along with the sick, an average of 10,000 Latinos have gathered nightly to see Avila, whose sermons are broadcast on 61 television channels and 258 radio stations throughout North, Central and South America.

It is also a scene so extravagantly melodramatic that it is bound to fill the hearts of the devout with joy or the minds of skeptics with doubt.

Unlike the solemnity of Catholicism that for centuries has been the spiritual staple of Latin America, the evangelistic crusades that Avila has led for three decades are raucous affairs where the idea is not quiet reflection, but witnessing tangible signs of the Lord’s presence.

As one of the faithful, 65-year-old Angela Baez, who suffers from a heart condition, put it last Friday: “I felt an incredible heat, something running through my body that left me trembling.”

Indeed, every night from the sea of the infirm at least a few dozen souls burst forth to testify that they have been healed.

Such was the case for Luis Magana, 83, an arthritic who in a moment of epiphany Friday threw down his walker and performed a jig to celebrate his newly found mobility.

Not everyone awaiting a miracle was so lucky.

On the same night, none of the four people who came in wheelchairs was able to leave walking, including Cruz Carrasco, 19, a former football star at Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles who was paralyzed 2 1/2 years ago in a drive-by shooting.

Despite three people hoisting him, massaging his legs and chanting prayers, Carrasco took only a few painful steps before he slumped back teary-eyed into his chair.

“I still have faith,” said his mother, Ernelda Carrasco. “He could never even stand up like that before.”

All of which is taken in stride by Avila, known as Brother Yiye, who has carried his message of divine healing to 28 countries around the world, including four previous stops in Los Angeles since 1981.

Although he says he has helped cure thousands of people suffering from everything from ulcers to alcoholism to flat feet, Avila cautions that not everyone who attends his rallies will be healed.

“It depends on the faith of the person,” said Avila, a handsome man with chiseled features.

Avila, who still lives in Camuy, the small Puerto Rican village where he was born, taught chemistry and biology for more than 20 years. He was also a champion weightlifter and bodybuilder who won the title of Mr. Puerto Rico in 1952 and Mr. North America in 1954.

A few years later, however, at the age of 34, Avila was overcome by rheumatoid arthritis that left him writhing in pain while training in his gymnasium. He began to read the Bible and pray.

As he tells it, one night he was awakened by the vision of a man with shoulder-length hair dressed in a white robe entering his bedroom. The man lifted him from the bed and then gently set him back down again.

“I knew that was the Lord in person calling me to serve him,” Avila said. “I promised him that I would, and I woke up healed.”

His ardor was evident at East Los Angeles College as Avila’s followers, who represent 50 Los Angeles-area churches, often swayed to his orations with their hands stretched open.

Out of the crowd stepped one man, a 35-year-old lab assistant from Silverlake named Ramon, who said he tested positive for the AIDS virus last September. Avila placed his hand on the man’s head and prayed.

Several minutes later, Ramon picked up his Bible and left, vowing to visit his doctor to see if the virus had been expunged.

“Naturally, it was embarrassing,” he said. “But God comes first. I have faith.”