Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas: An Interdisciplinary Approach

8. From Turkey to the United States: The Trajectory of Cuban Sephardim in Miami

141 From Turkey to the United States The Trajectory of Cuban Sephardim in Miami Margalit Bejarano The Sephardic Congregation of Florida in Miami Beach was founded by Sephardim who had left Cuba following the Castro revolution (1959). The community is situated at the crossroads of Latin America and the United States and is characterized as having four collective identities: Jewish, Sephardic, Cuban, and American. Cuban Jews in the United States are defined by scholars as “Jewish Hispanics ” or “Hispanic Jews,” a hybrid group that differs both from the typical Latin immigrants and from the English-speaking Jewish “Anglos” (see Green 1995, 132). The importance of this group has been growing because of the increasing Hispanization of South Florida as well as the constant immigration of Latin American Jews and of different groups of Sephardim who settled in Greater Miami. The Sephardim from Cuba share with other Sephardic groups the religious tradition and memories of a remote past, while their coreligionists from Latin America speak the same language and have a similar social background. The objective of this chapter is to analyze the connections between places and memories, and their influence on the formation of the collective identity on the Cuban-American Sephardim. The first part will deal with Miami and its Jewish population; the second with the historical memory from the three main stations in the history of this community: Sepharad, the Ottoman Empire, and Cuba; the An earlier version of this article was published in 2003 in Hebrew: “Between the United States and Latin America: On the Sephardic Cuban Community of Miami,” Pe’amim 97 (Autumn): 107–23. 142  Ideological Divergence third will deal with the encounter with the United States and the processes of integration and organization that consolidated the four identities. Miami: A Population in Transition Miami in South Florida is the entrance gate for passengers from Latin America: it is an enormous metropolitan city, an international crossroad for commerce and finance, a lively center of entertainment and recreation, and a haven for political refugees. Greater Miami is a meeting place for different ethnic groups, including the largest group of Cubans in the United States, and is one of the largest centers of Jewish population. The Cuban exile started to consolidate immediately after the revolution of Fidel Castro that deposed the government of Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar. In the early years after the revolution, a large number of the economic and social elites of prerevolutionary Cuba arrived in Miami, including the owners of land properties or large business enterprises, professionals, managers, and technicians (Fagen, Brody, and O’Leary 1968, 16–23; Portes and Bach 1985, 84). The socioeconomic level of the immigrants from Cuba declined gradually, but the elite groups formed the basic characteristics of the Cuban exile. They participated in the economic development of South Florida, acquiring considerable success. At the same time they integrated into local politics and became pressure groups also on a federal level. Nevertheless, they still consider their life in the United States as el exilio, continuing to cherish dreams of return to their homeland, while waiting for the fall of the “Antichrist”—Fidel Castro. Lisandro Pérez predicted that the “exile” would become “a minority” after the disappearance of the two basic conditions that nourish it: the power of Fidel Castro and the hostile policy of the United States toward Cuba (1990, 4–5; Rieff 1993, 26–32).1 The Jewish population in Southeast Florida is the third largest Jewish concentration in the United States (after New York and Los Angeles) and is the sixth largest urban center in the Jewish world.2 Miami, which Deborah Dash Moore 1. The passing of power to Raúl, Fidel’s brother, in 2006, did not change that conception. 2. According to the American Jewish Yearbook (2010) there were 2,007,850 Jews living in New York; 684,950 in Los Angeles; and 485,850 in South Florida—not including part time residents From Turkey to the United States  143 described as a “Golden City,” was a small and distant recreation town, full of sunny beaches and palm trees, where the “snowbirds” from northeastern United States sought refuge from the cold winter. After World War II it became a prosperous commercial and industrial center that attracted retired Jews from New York and Chicago (1994, 26–29; Lehrman and Rappaport 1956). A study conducted by Ira Sheskin from the University of Miami...