An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (review)

Anthropologist Ruth Behar was born in Cuba in 1956. Her family left two years after the Castro Revolution. Her first return trip to Cuba in 1979 was as a graduate st udent. She hoped to do her doctoral research there, but the doors closed once again to U.S. visitors. Her visits resumed in the nineties when Castro attempted to bolster sagging morale and a sinking economy by allowing the "U.S. dollar and God" (p. 21) to make a comeback. Usually limited to fourteen-day stays, she got intimate glimpses of the Jews who did not leave. She traveled back as often as she could to stand side by side with Jews "who were learning how to be Jews" (p. 15) but not to use them for her fieldwork until she realized that being an anthropologist was her "passport" to return. She teamed up with photographer Humberto Mayol in 2002 and over the next four years they traveled throughout the island documenting what they saw.

The book offers a brief historical introduction and an excellent chronology that tell why and how Jews from all over Europe and the Middle East flocked to Cuba in the early years of the twentieth century. These ethnically divergent immigrants (lumped together as polacos or turcos by the Cubans), who came to number around 16,000, created separate institutions and contributed to social change in the years leading up to Castro's revolution. Although they did have fledgling institutions, the twenties and thirties were uncertain times for Jews as waves of xenophobia influenced laws and Nazi rhetoric tainted the press. But in the forties and fifties these immigrants, who began to establish themselves in businesses and professions, were joined by entrepreneurial Jews born in the United States coming to make their fortunes on tropical soil. To -gether they built schools, synagogues, and social clubs. The triumph of Castro in 1959 caused an abrupt rupture in Jewish life. In a very brief span of time over 90 percent of the community left. The Jews who stayed were splintered, impoverished, isolated, and demoralized for many years. Only after constitutional changes in the nineties have Jews been able to practice their faith openly. With the help of outside institutions—the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Lubavitchers, the American Joint Distribution Committee, the Conservative Movement, and many others—the Jews of Cuba have reconstituted themselves, refurbished their synagogues, learned their history and rituals, reaffirmed their connections to the faith in conversions and communal marriage ceremonies and, in some cases, made Aliyah.

The first order of business for Behar are the ghosts left behind. In "Blessings for the Dead" she seeks and finds the tomb of a cousin who died just before his bar mitzvah in 1954. Then Elisa Behar's grave in Guanabacoa puzzles her for years. Finally, in a distant town, she meets the son of the man who had the ornate tomb built for his first wife. Statues of angels have been stolen from her grave just as bones of Jews are stolen by practitioners of African rituals. Behar visits cemeteries across the island, but she discovers that many Jews are not buried in Jewish cemeteries, particularly those who married outside the faith. Others lie in small cemeteries that have been closed or abandoned.

Support from the outside world has allowed Jewish survival. Through the years the much awaited Passover shipments create a common bond for Cuban Jewry. One chapter is devoted to a particularly adept schnorrer who advises Behar to visit Adath Israel (an orthodox shul supported by the Lubavitchers) on the day Mr. Fisher, a Canadian philanthropist, makes his biannual visit. Behar sees the joy and humiliation the congregants experience in receiving toiletries, food, and even underpants directly from their benefactor.

It is hard to be a Jew in Cuba. There are few kosher butchers. In one town the Jew she wants to interview is off searching for a leg of...