How Will Renewed American-Cuban Relations Affect Jews and Israel?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

President Barack Obama created a political bombshell when he announced that the United States would be re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba, after an absence of almost 54 years.

The news was accompanied by Cuba’s release of American Alan Gross, who had been imprisoned for five years, and the swap of a Cuban who had spied for the U.S. for three Cubans jailed in Florida.

Gross was detained in December 2009, during his fifth trip to Cuba, and sentenced to 15 years in a Cuban prison for trying to deliver satellite telephone equipment while working as a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Gross was also involved with Cuba’s small Jewish community, setting up Internet access that would bypass local censorship and help connect Cuban Jews to the outside world.

A large number of Jews immigrated to Cuba from 1910 until 1920. Many of these Jews came from Eastern Europe and used Cuba as a stopover en route to the United States, which had a strict quota system at that time.

However, some decided to stay. Many of the new immigrants from Europe prospered in Cuban’s garment industry. By 1924, there were 24,000 Jews living in Cuba, and more immigrated to the country in the 1930s.

But during and after the 1959 Communist revolution, 94 per cent of the Jews left for the United States and other countries, and only about 2,000 remain.

However, Jews remained able to practice their religion. They were permitted to buy and distribute kosher food and could receive donations from Canada and other countries for Passover food products.

In 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba changed its constitution allowing for more religious freedom. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) has been instrumental in helping Cuba’s Jewish population.

Since 1992, the JDC has sent rabbis and community organizers to the community. The community maintains that anti-Semitism is rare. Still, Cuban Jews have to make a strong effort just to keep their tradition alive.

On the other hand, Cuba has long been critical of Israel, and the two countries have no diplomatic relations. After the 1967 Six Day War, Cuba condemned Israel at the United Nations. Its ambassador, Ricardo Alarcon, called the war an “armed aggression against the Arab peoples.”

At the 1973 Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Algiers, Castro announced that Arab arguments had convinced him to sever relations with Israel. A year later, the government invited PLO leader Yasser Arafat to the island.

In 1975, Cuba was one of only three non-Arab governments to sponsor the resolution declaring “Zionism is Racism” that was adopted by the UN General Assembly.

This hostility continues unabated. During last summer’s war in the Gaza Strip, Cuba accused Israel of using its military and technological superiority to execute a policy of collective punishment causing the death of innocent civilians and huge material damage.

Fidel Castro, in an article titled “Palestinian Holocaust in Gaza,” published in the Communist newspaper Granma Aug. 5, referred to “the genocide of Palestinians,” and described Israel’s offensive in Gaza as a “new, repugnant form of fascism.”

Clearly, relations between Havana and Jerusalem are not on the horizon.