In the growing literature on Latin American Jewry, Cuba has presented a notable gap. Jewish settlement on the island began with the Spanish-American War and practically ended in the 1960s. As people scattered, the archives of Jewish institutions were sequestered, though several cartons of materials were “liberated” by a departing Yiddish-language typesetter.
With the recent easing of travel restrictions, several scholars have turned their attention to the by-now moribund Jewish community, its numbers reduced by revolution and expropriation from 15,000 to a possible 1,000. In the past two years, Margalit Bejarano of Hebrew University and Cuban-born Ruth Behar of the University of Michigan, each with a legal status different from that of embargoed Norteamericanos, have produced valuable work. In his study, Robert Levine makes extensive use of research by these and other scholars, whom he acknowledges generously.
Although better known as a Brazilianist, Levine is not a newcomer to Cuban studies. His video Hotel Cuba: A Historical Diary of the Pre-Castro Jewish Experience (codirected and written with Mark D. Szuchman) won the Hubert Herring Prize for best documentary film-video of 1984. Living as he does in the heart of the Cuban exile community, Levine here supplements published and unpublished research with interviews with Cuban Jews resident in Florida.
The author has created a densely textured history that emphasizes the evanescent nature of the Jewish experience in Cuba, a diaspora without a nucleus or the time to coalesce into a community. The book is a palimpsest of individual experiences of Syrian, Turkish, Polish, German, and “American” (read naturalized Romanian) Jews. With the telling aid of photographs, Levine integrates the disparate experiences of Ashkenazic, Eastern, and Sephardic Jews as they struggled to adjust to the Cuban milieu at successive times and under various regimes—a major achievement.
As a Latin Americanist, Levine shows a less substantial knowledge of Jewish history. The Sephardim who originated in the Old Ottoman Empire tended to oppose Zionism because of their ties to Turkey, whether they lived in Cuba or another country. Yiddish-speaking Communist Party cells arose not from self-segregation but from the International’s policy of addressing workers in their own language.
Like other researchers who have examined this topic, Levine finds no institutionalized anti-Semitism on the island, whether under Machado, Grau, Batista, or Castro. Even the refusal to admit Jews fleeing Nazism aboard the St. Louis, Levine concludes, was an anomaly in the generally good Cuban record of admitting Jewish refugees. “Ironically,” he adds, “the same Jews barred from entering the United States as undesirable aliens [at the time of the St. Louis affair] … were welcomed as refugees from Castro’s Cuba. … Cuban Jews came to Miami and to New York as Cubans, not as Jews.”
Given these exiles’ continuing attachment to the island they so briefly called home, the author’s conclusion is poignant: those who were most successful in accommodating to Cuban life were the very ones who found themselves obliged to leave after the triumph of the revolution.
