Sephardic Jews in Cuba - From all their Habitations

Judaism, Wntr, 2002 by Margalit Bejarano

In 1928 a group of Jewish university and high school students, most of whom belonged to the Sephardic community, founded the Circulo de Estudiantes Hebreos. Their objective was to bring the Jews closer to mainstream Cuban culture and to encourage Jewish youth to acquire a general education. The Students' Circle published the monthly El Estudiante Hebreo, in which many of the younger generation Sephardim published their views. (35) The publication was suspended in 1930 under Machado's dictatorship, when the government closed the university of Havana.

The Sephardic community of Havana succeeded in consolidating its communal organization right from the beginning since it was ethnically an homogenous group. The Sephardic Jews who settled in Cuba came mainly from two specific areas in Turkey in the regions of Istanbul and Edirne. Early immigration consisted also of Jews from Izmir (in the Asian part of Turkey), Aleppo (Syria) and the Balkan countries, but by 1930 most of them had left Cuba, and those who remained integrated into the Turkish community. (36) Roberto Namer, one of the early Syrian Jews who settled in Holguin, was nominated as Cuba's consul to Palestine in 1935.

In 1931 representatives of Chevet Ahim turned to the Spanish Consul in order to obtain Spanish passports, arguing that "the Sephardim were united with the Spaniards for ethnical reasons, and spiritually they feel like them." (37) The Spanish consul, who represented a colony that numbered 16% of the Cuban population, did not respond to the requests of the Turkish Jews to accept them as Spanish citizens.

Oral histories of immigrants from Turkey who settled in the towns of the interior reflect a strong tendency for the preservation of the traditional social patterns brought over from Turkey, emphasizing family ties and religion, and exercising pressure on the younger generation, especially the girls, to maintain a social barrier with the Cuban society: "Family life was exactly the same as in Turkey; there was no difference whatsoever. The religious life was the same, the social life was the same, family life was the same... we didn't have friends who were not Jewish. At that time (in the 1920s) it was impossible to have. The Fathers were guarding the whole family, all the daughters, where they were going, at what time they were coming." (38)

This tendency of social segregation was also transmitted to the second generation, as a means of defense against assimilation. (39)

The economic crises of the 1920s coincided with the American Quota Acts, that converted Cuba into an alternative migration destination and thus to a meeting point of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. The Sephardim resembled other Middle Eastern immigrants in their dispersion throughout the island and their work in itinerant commerce. The unique character of the Sephardic community of Cuba derived, however, from its homogenous composition and from the presence of recognized spiritual leaders. Based on chains of immigration that connected them with Silivri and Kilklareli, they were able to structure their communal organization along the model of these two Turkish communities. The Sephardic community of Cuba thus became an example of a disappearing Jewish center in the Ottoman Empire that re-emerged in the New World.