Author explores Jewish-Cuban population

BY NAZBANOO PAHLAVI in this week's www.suncommunitynewspapers.com

I was already familiar with the term “Jewban,” the catchy moniker meant for people of both Jewish and Cuban origin. But at a February 12 book signing at Barnes and Noble in Encino, I discovered that this term reflects a specific community that lives in Miami and represents a sort of bridge between the Jews of South Beach and the Cubans of Havana.

Cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar has put together a collection of stories and photographs documenting the small population of Jews in Cuba in her new book, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, published by Rutgers University Press.

Jewish origins on the island go back to the turn of the twentieth century when small numbers of Americans migrated there, soon followed by an influx of Sephardic Turks and later Ashkenazi Jews from Poland and Russia. Strict immigration quotas in the 1920s had forced many aspiring to live in the United States to settle in Cuba instead.

Luckily, Behar said, many fell in love with their life in the tropics and established a strong presence by building synagogues, community centers, businesses, and planning a future on this unlikely island home. In the 1950s, the population of Jews in Cuba grew to about 15,000.

Behar’s interest in this unusual group is not purely anthropological, but also deeply personal – Behar, who is of both Turkish and Polish Jewish decent, was born and raised in Cuba until the age of four, when the Castro regime convinced her family to emigrate. During that time, she said, the Jewish community experienced a sort of exodus, with about 90 percent opting to leave, mostly for the U.S.

“Jews didn’t leave because they were Jews. They left because they were Cuban,” Behar stressed to her audience. The majority left their homes because of the nationalization of property, including small, Jewish-owned mom and pop stores, and a general dislike for working for the new government. Currently, the Jewish population in Cuba is about 1,000.

Behar, who moved with her family to New York, spoke Spanish at home and experienced a melding of her unique cultures growing up as an American. “We celebrated Passover, and then the next week we would go and eat at a Cuban restaurant,” she said.

Behar recalled her early inability to relate with other Jewish Cubans, especially those in Miami, because many had no intention of returning to Cuba. Behar, on the other hand, yearned to go back and was even discouraged by her own family – “that chapter of our diasporic wondering is over,” she remembered hearing.

This set her off on a “spiritual journey” where she began making regular trips to Cuba through the 1990s. The personal relationships she created there and the stories she heard became the source of An Island Called Home.

Ruth Behar is a longtime Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and recipient of several grants including the MacArthur Foundation genius fellowship and Fulbright award. She received Ph.D. from Princeton University, and is currently a visiting distinguished professor at the University of Miami.