Thomas Wolfe, the great American novelist, coined a phrase when he said, “You can’t go home again.” Ruth Behar, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, turns that time-worn saying on its head.
Born in Havana, Behar left Cuba with her family after the 1959 revolution, when she was only five years old.
Growing up in New York City, she had no memories of Cuba. But one day, as she gazed at her parents and grandparents’ photographs of their lives in Cuba before the dawn of the Fidel Castro era, she was over-come by nostalgia and a desire to go back to her “lost home” on that “beloved island.”
In 1979, she finally got her chance, going to Cuba for a week to conduct research for her PhD dissertation. She was there during a brief thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations.
She returned in the 1990s in a personal capacity. “I simply wanted to be a Jew in Cuba,” she writes in her poignant memoir, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (Rutgers University Press).
Having whetted her appetite, Behar returned to Cuba again and again. “The more I went to Cuba, the more I needed to go. I had become a Cuba addict. I needed my fix.”
She adds, “After a few months of being away from the island, I started to feel an intense desire to return… I miss-ed Cuban voices, Cuban streets, Cuban sunlight.”
In An Island Called Home, Behar explores Cuba in terms of its history of Jewish settlement and its present-day Jewish community. Her supple text is supplemented by the vivid photographs of Cuban photographer Humberto Ma-yol.
Like most Cuban Jews, the Behars arrived in Cuba in the early 20th century. Behar’s grandmother, Esther, a Polish Jew from the town of Goworowo who died in 2000 in Miami Beach, immigrated to Havana in 1927 at the age of 19, hoping to become a cabaret singer. Instead, she married Behar’s grandfather, Maximo, and worked with him in his fabric shop.
Centuries before Esther’s arrival, Conversos, or Spanish Jewish converts to Christianity, were the first Jews to set foot in Cuba.
Completely assimilated, they were followed by Jews from the United States in the wake of the 1898 Spanish-American War and by Sephardi Jews from the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s.
Ashkenazi Jews, mainly from Poland, came next. They made such an im-pact that Cubans assumed that all Cuban Jews were from Poland. Henceforth, they generally referred to Jews as polaco, or Pole.
Behar suggests that many Jews, particularly from Poland, considered Cuba a stepping-stone to the United States. Indeed, they referred to Cuba as “Hotel Cuba,” regarding it as a temporary lodg-ing, not a real home.
Until World War II, however, they had few opportunities to settle in the United States due to its restrictive immigration policy.
According to Behar, Jews were not allowed to become Cuban citizens in the 1920s, but when citizenship became attainable in the 1930s, it was too costly for most Jewish immigrants.
The vast majority of Jews operated mom-and-pop shops in Havana and pro-vincial cities, but a handful were wealthy merchants who ran large stores and whole-sale businesses.
By 1959, Cuba was home to about 15,000 Jews in a population of 16 mil-lion. The community was anchored by a wide range of social, cultural and educational institutions, and by synagogues in Havana, Santa Clara, Camaguey and Santiago de Cuba.
With Castro’s ascendancy, nine out of 10 Jews emigrated, assuming that the revolution and capitalism were incompatible.
Initially, though, most Jews supported Castro’s accession to power, Behar claims. “The Jews no longer thought of [Cuba] as Hotel Cuba. They had created a home, and they wanted a new country to arise, unfettered by the rampant corruption that had turned Cuba into a backyard colony of the Americans. They welcomed the reforms that sought to create greater equality.”
Eventually, however, Jews soured on the revolution, realizing that Castro’s embrace of communism would bring on the nationalization of property and schools, the control of the family by the state and the imposition of atheism, all of which would signal an end to Jewish religious life.
“When the Jews left Cuba, it was truly an exodus, for they fled quickly and en masse – nearly everyone gone by 1965,” she says. “They departed with the urgency of a people who believed the sea had parted only long enough to let them go. The dissolution of the community was swift, intense, like a lit can-dle snuffed out by the wind.”
Yet, as Behar discovered, Jewish life never completely disappeared.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, synagogues in Havana and Santiago de Cuba functioned with the participation of Jewish elders.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Jewish Congress provided the community with year-ly shipments of Passover food. These so-called matzah packages, she observes, became “the last link that Jews in Cuba maintained to their heritage.”
By the 1980s, the remaining Jews of Cuba were intermarried and had pulled away from religion. But a 1992 decree declaring Cuba a secular rather than an atheist state emboldened Cubans to ret-urn to their roots, Behar says.
“Seeking spiritual solace at a time when revolutionary ideals were crumbling, Cubans began to practise a range of religions,” she writes, citing, among other faiths, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam and Judaism.
Cuba’s “new” Jewish community bears no resemblance to the pre-1959 community, “looking a lot like the rest of Cuba, a mix of white, black and everything in between,” Behar says.
Most of its 1,500 members are descendants of “the uncounted Jews” who married Christians prior to the revolution and were assimilated.
“Only about 25 Jews in Cuba today are ‘pure Jews,’ people born of a Jewish mother and a Jewish father, though relative to their size they have played an important role in maintaining Jewish history and memory.”
Although they are usually not well off financially, there are many professionals – doctors, engineers and lawyers – in the community.
Since 1992, more than 600 Jews have made aliyah, but only a small number stay on in Israel, acquire an Israeli identity and send their children to the army.
“Israel is too radically different a society for them to feel at home there as Cubans, and so inevitably the Jewish promised land becomes a stepping-stone to reach Miami, the Cuban promised land.”
Cuba is officially pro-Palestinian and has had no diplomatic relations with Israel since 1973. But there is “wide admiration and respect for the Jewish people” in Cuba, and Cuban Jews suffer no discrimination, she writes.