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BY DANA EVAN KAPLAN

Cuba has been attracting a great deal of attention recently. While the protracted custody battle over Elián González received the most publicity, there have also been two cases of alleged spying, several high-level cultural exchanges, American trade missions, trials of Cuban dissidents, and even a series of baseball games between the Baltimore Orioles and a Cuban team.

From the Jewish standpoint as well, Cuba has become more important, as various American Jewish organizations send missions to visit the Cuban Jewish community, participate in religious and cultural activities, and provide essential food and medicine. Till soon after the revolution, the American Jewish Year Book published regular reports on the Jews of the country written by Abraham J. Dubelman. Dubelman’s last report appeared in the 1962 volume, and, with the exception of a report on the Cuban Jews of Miami , this is the first AJYB article on the topic since.

The Jewish community in Cuba today is but a small percentage of what it was before the revolution of 1959. Then, among the more than six million Cubans, there were 10,000–16,500 Jews, with communities not only in Havana but also in Santa Clara, Camagüey, Santiago de Cuba, and many other locations. The Jews of Havana had five synagogues: Unión Hebrea Chevet Ahim , the United Hebrew Congregation , Adath Israel, Centro Sefaradi, and the Patronato, the largest, which had been built as a Jewish center in 1953 (its full name was Patronato de la Casa de la Comunidad Hebrea de Cuba). About 75 percent of the Jews in the country were Ashkenazi, the rest Sephardi.

Unlike the Catholics, the mainline Protestants, and the smaller religious groups such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gideon’s Band, and Pentecostals, substantial numbers of whom remained in the country after the revolution, most of the Jewish community emigrated. Those who remained, like the Christian religious groups, went into a “dormant state” enabling their community to survive in skeletal form under unfavorable political circumstances. Finally, with the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe, the catastrophic decline of the Cuban economy in the early 1990s, and the resulting government reforms, religious groups were able to come out of hibernation and rebuild their organizations. After years of using a combination of confrontation, defiance, silence, cooperation, and subterfuge, the various religious groups are now in a position to play a leading role in Cuban society and perhaps assist the country in moving away from socialism.

Because of their small numbers, the Jews have been exceptionally careful to avoid antagonizing the government, and the government, for its own reasons, has been equally keen to avoid any action that might be perceived as anti-Jewish. Thus the Jewish community escaped the worst of the antireligious policies of the regime, particularly in the early decades of Communist rule. Nevertheless, in another respect the tiny Jewish community operated at a distinct disadvantage: Unlike the Christian groups, establishment or fringe, the Jews could not recruit freely from the general population. Nevertheless, a remarkable Jewish renaissance is underway in Cuba. To understand this phenomenon requires some background on Jewish life in the country during the Castro years.

The Cuban Revolution and The Jews

It is difficult for Americans to conceive of a Cuba without its charismatic and idiosyncratic leader Fidel Castro. He has held power for more than 40 years, after leading a revolutionary movement that overthrew the corrupt government of Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar. Despite their small numbers and the enormous amount of military aid that the United States gave Batista, the revolutionary forces of Ché Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos took control of Havana on New Year’s Day, 1959. Most Cubans—including many Cuban Jews—greeted Castro’s victory with tremendous enthusiasm. Cubans of all economic classes had suffered under Batista’s rule, and were disgusted by his excesses and corruption. Not only Batista, but the entire political system had been discredited; Castro and the other rebels had tremendous moral authority.

The majority of Jewish men were owners of small businesses, with about 15 percent owning large stores and wholesale enterprises. Others were professionals—engineers, physicians, managers, and so forth. Although many Jews, particularly among the Ashkenazim, had originally intended to pass through “Hotel Cuba” on their way to the United States, by the late 1950s nearly all who remained in Cuba had developed strong economic roots in the country. There was a small group of dedicated Jewish Communists, but since so much of the community owned businesses, Jews were identified as “capitalists.” Their businesses were potential targets for confiscation, putting their middle-class lifestyle in jeopardy. But at that point nothing was for certain.

1959 was a time of both hope and uncertainty as Cubans waited to see how the new government would deal with many pressing issues. In July 1959, President Carlos Manuel Urrutia Lleo resigned, and over the next several months Castro, then the premier, appointed Communists to head most of the ministries. Communists also took control of the trade unions. While few Jews emigrated during 1959, they watched the unfolding political events with great trepidation, worried less about anti-Semitism than about the political and economic policies that the government might adopt.

In fact the revolutionaries displayed no signs of anti-Semitic sentiments; if anything, they seemed well-disposed toward Jews. Three of the ten original members of the Cuban Communist Party came from Jewish backgrounds. Fabio Grobart, who had arrived in Cuba with the name Abraham Simchowitz, remained an important Communist leader until his death many years later. Among the younger generation, Manuel (Stolik) Novigrod, whose parents had been long-time Jewish Communists, fought with the revolutionaries in the Sierra Maestra Mountains and became a career diplomat under the Castro regime. A number of other Jews also served in the revolutionary government, most prominently Enrique Oltuski, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland who arrived in Cuba after World War I. While studying in Miami, he watched the unfolding of the revolutionary struggle with a growing sense of guilt. “My conscience pricked me… my comrades were dying and fighting in Cuba, while I was living well in the United States. Every day, I used to say I had to go back to Cuba, so one day I got up and went.” Oltuski joined the struggle in 1955 and organized the 26th of July movement in the province of Las Villas. In 1959, at the age of 27, he was made minister of communications, staying in the cabinet even after the fall of President Lleo, in itself a remarkable political accomplishment. Originally at odds with Ché Guevera, the two soon became quite close. Despite a number of political setbacks, he continued in government service, and today is deputy minister of fisheries. Other Jews became prominent as well, such as Dr. José Altschuler, president of the Comisión de Intercosmos de Cuba, responsible for overseeing the Cuban space program.

Castro did not apply the same political pressure on the Jewish community that he did on the Catholic Church and most other Christian denominations. Unlike the Catholic Church, which had a vast organizational network that could conceivably have been used to develop an opposition movement, and unlike the other Christian groups, which had the potential to organize mass resistance among the populace, the tiny Jewish community was no threat whatsoever.

After the Revolution

During the course of 1959 it became increasingly clear that Castro’s economic policies would ruin the middle class, but still, very few Jews emigrated. As late as December 1960, the leadership of the Patronato—the most important Jewish communal institution—was essentially the same as before the revolution. Herman Heisler remained president, Morris Konski, Dr. Enrique Eiber, and Herman Lipstein remained the three vice presidents, Isaac Gurwitz was the general secretary, and Abraham Marcus Matterín and Jaime Bloch were the vice secretaries. Dr. Bernardo Benes, later to become well known as emissary to Fidel Castro for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, was the congregation’s attorney. Moisés Baldás, who would take over as president the following year, was not yet on the board.

According to the teachings of the revolution, those who had developed businesses were guilty of profiting at the expense of the masses, and were therefore “enemies of the revolution.” As businesses were confiscated during 1960 and 1961, more Jews left. In 1961, Israel and Cuba reached an agreement permitting Cuban Jews to go to Israel in return for shipments of goats and eggs; a good number of these Jews soon left Israel and went elsewhere. Many more Cuban Jews left directly for Miami, the center of Cuban exile life. Others stayed, hoping that the situation would stabilize or improve. By 1962 all such hopes were dashed, and many more Jews left as part of a massive exodus of hundreds of thousands of other middle- and upper-class Cubans. Those who remained were disproportionately elderly or ill.

The emigration process could be traumatic. Once a family applied for an exit visa, a Cuban governmental official would come and make an inventory of everything in the house. If the family was suspected of removing things from the home prior to the inspection, emigration could be delayed. A representative of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) reported on the situation in July 1961:

It is disastrous—the rich have left, some having foreseen the situation, but these are few…. all assets [have been] taken over by the government, the militia, or other bandits who have simply taken over everything which our brothers have left behind after having worked for many years, sacrificing themselves to make their way…. Those who remain can do nothing; business is dying for lack of merchandise, and the large industries, as well as the small ones, are being nationalized. Owners are being watched strictly.

By December 1961 at least 3,800 Jews had already left the country, with another thousand in the process of leaving. The previous month Castro had declared: “ I am a Marxist-Leninist and I shall be one until the last day of my life.” This put an end to any remaining hopes for a return to the life that Jews had known before the revolution. By early 1963 a much larger number of Jews had left. At that time Congregation Adath Israel and the Unión Sionista de Cuba, (Zionist Union of Cuba) conducted a census of those registering to receive Passover supplies. They found that there were only 1,022 Jewish families in the country, composed of 2,586 individuals, most living in Havana.

Israeli ambassador Haim Yaari estimated that 45 percent of the Jews who remained in the country during the 1960s were unemployed. Most of these people survived by gradually selling off their more valuable possessions, such as washing machines, dryers, ovens, family heirlooms, and jewelry. Once again, there is little evidence to suggest that Jews were singled out for negative treatment. A number of American Jewish organizations that were monitoring the situation stressed that Jews were fleeing Cuba because of political and economic difficulties, not anti-Semitism.

Charles Shapiro, a major businessman in Havana and an American citizen, appears to have been a specific target of violence. A leader of the United Hebrew Congregation, Shapiro had been living in Cuba for about 35 years. In August 1960, Shapiro and his wife, Wilma, along with ten other relatives and several servants, were beaten, tied up, and robbed in their elegant home by five armed Cubans, who ransacked the house and took all the money and jewelry they found. Almost simultaneously, the family’s department store, Los Precios Fijos, one of the largest in Havana, went up in flames, and government authorities detained the Shapiros’ son, Jeffery, the store manager, for a short time. While there was no evidence that the Shapiros were targeted because they were Jewish, the incident increased Jewish trepidation about staying in the country.

Another spur to emigration was fear that the government might at some point decide to restrict the freedom of Cubans to leave the country. Indeed, a law went into effect on July 26, 1963, stating that all males between the ages of 15 and 50 were obligated to perform military service, and from then on emigration became more difficult for men in that age bracket and their families.

The Castro Government and the Jews

The revolutionary forces had portrayed themselves as reformers whose goal was to redress the injustices committed by former government, and specifically to reverse the arrangements that had been allowed to develop through sweetheart deals signed by corrupt senior officials. The groups that faced retribution were those that had been part of the Batista regime, and, virtually no Jews had been high-ranking government officials or military officers under Batista. It is true that some American Jewish gangsters, such as Meyer Lansky, were involved with Batista in the development of casino gambling, but none of them were arrested or tried. When Lansky’s Havana Riviera Hotel was officially confiscated on October 24, 1960, no one suggested that the Communists had anti-Semitic motives; after all, 165 other American enterprises, including the Cuban subsidiaries and franchises of Canada Dry, Goodyear, Kodak, Westinghouse, and Woolworth’s, were also seized.

Although Castro’s foreign policy towards the State of Israel has had its ups and downs, he has pursued a consistently benign policy towards the local Cuban Jewish community. There are a number of theories about why Castro did not adopt the kind of anti-Jewish policies instituted by the Communists in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. Castro had a number of Jewish friends and supporters, and his relations with one or more of them may have predisposed him not to attack the Jewish community. It is also possible that Castro wanted to avoid anti-Semitism precisely in order to differentiate his regime from that of the Soviet Union, an explanation that would also cover his decision to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War, when the entire Communist bloc broke relations with the exception of Cuba. Some have argued that the Castro regime did not want to generate additional hostility by persecuting a small and vulnerable religious minority, but it is hard to believe that the same government that was willing to antagonize the superpower to the north would fear the fallout from its treatment of local Jews. Havana historian Maritza Corrales Capestany suggests that, in the early years, many Cubans, and perhaps Castro as well, felt that Cuba and Israel were both small, struggling, socialist states beset by much larger and stronger enemies. Many Cubans also felt great sympathy for the tremendous suffering that the Jews had endured in the Holocaust.

Another theory is that Castro believes he is of Marrano ancestry. Certainly the name Castro was a common last name of Marranos (anusim in Hebrew, sometimes called conversos in Spanish), Jews who converted to Christianity—either willingly or unwillingly—before or at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Maurice Halperin writes that in 1960 Castro told Ricardo Wolf, Cuba’s ambassador to Israel, that he had Marrano ancestors. Lavy Becker, who visited Cuba for the Canadian Jewish Congress, recalls hearing the same thing from Wolf. This account has also been confirmed by Dr. Bernardo Benes, who told reporter Ann Louise Bardach that “He [Castro] said to me in passing, ‘As you know, I have Jewish ancestors.’ He said he wanted Cuba to be a second Israel.” In a recent conversation, Benes added a few details: “I had heard that he [Castro] was from Jewish ancestry. … I told him, ‘The next time you go to a mirror, look at your nose, and look what you have done with this little island here in front of the powerful United States. Only a Jew could have done that.’ Castro asked me, ‘So there is no problem with being a Jew?’ and I said ‘Of course not, I’m one.’” Benes recalled a time in 1984, when he, Benes, was negotiating with Castro on behalf of President Reagan: “I remember the exact date. It was May 18, 1984. … In the middle of an unrelated conversation, he said to me, ‘You know, my Jewish ancestors. …’ I remember the words exactly.” Benes told me, “I gave him to read the autobiography of Golda Meir, My Life. He was very impressed after he read it. He told me that she was one of the most distinguished women of the 20th century.” “This is just my personal opinion,” concluded Benes, “but I think he wanted to do in Cuba what the Israelis had done in the Middle East.”

Castro’s daughter, Alina, has written that Castro’s maternal grandfather was a Turkish Jew from Istanbul named Francisco Ruz. She described her great-grandfather as “a boy in Istanbul, who had ancestral memories of a greater empire, when his family of Jewish renegades probably dropped a letter from their last name, shortening it [from Ruiz] to Ruz.” This would be a startling revelation if true, but it is not, since Alina Fernández told her mother Naty (Natalia) Revuelta that this was “the only lie in the book.” What apparently is true is that many of Castro’s classmates called him “judío,” “Jew,” because he had not been baptized by the age of seven. In popular Cuban usage, the word judío was used to refer to a child who had not yet been baptized. It is certainly possible that this and other experiences made him sympathize with the plight of the Jews. In his discussions with Frei Betto, Castro talks about his memories of Holy Week:

Holy Week in the countryside—I remember them from when I was very young—were days of solemnity; there was great solemnity. What was said? That Christ died on Good Friday. You couldn’t talk or joke or be happy, because Christ was dead and the Jews killed him every year. This is another case in which accusations or popular beliefs have caused tragedies and historic prejudices. I tell you, I didn’t know what that term meant, and I thought, at first, that those birds called judíos had killed Christ.

Whatever his motivations, Castro’s attitude toward the Jews of Cuba after the revolution was remarkably positive. Instead of tarring the emigrating Jews with the taint of disloyalty, he expressed regret that so many Jews, who might have contributed much to the new Cuba, were leaving. James Rice, executive director of HIAS from 1956 to 1966, recalled that Castro asked the Israeli ambassador in Havana why Cuban Jews felt it necessary to emigrate, since he had nothing whatsoever against them and would have been happy to use their talents to develop the new socialist regime. Furthermore, David Kopilow has noted that the revolutionary government classified Cuban Jews going to Israel as repatriados, repatriated ones, rather than gusanos, worms, which is what other emigrants were called.

Despite the small number of Jews left in the country, Judaism continued to be a subject of great interest in Castro’s Cuba. During the mid- and late-1960s, the regime found numerous ways to use Jewish subjects in creative ways consistent with its ideological program. The government-controlled media lavished attention on Jewish holidays and cultural events: Passover was portrayed as a celebration of the “national liberation” of the Jews, and other holidays were likewise given a “Fidelistic” interpretation.

Of course the country had many problems, and Cuban Jews suffered along with the rest of the population. On the most basic level, living in Communist Cuba meant adapting to a lower standard of living than before. Nevertheless, those affiliated with the Jewish community enjoyed certain benefits. Kosher butchers were among the few private businesses not nationalized by the government. There was a widely held perception that Jews were allowed additional meat and poultry to compensate for the fact that they did not eat pork. Moisés Baldás, head of the community from 1961 through 1978, believed that the Cuban authorities thought that Jews had to have kosher meat in order to comply with the Jewish religion; that is, that Judaism required the eating of meat. The government allowed a kosher restaurant to stay open in Havana, and Radio Havana continued to broadcast Communist propaganda in Yiddish even after other foreign-language radio programs were banned.

The Jews of Cuba Since the Castro Revolution