Down a bumpy dirt road, next to abandoned railroad tracks with overgrown grass and a handful of curious locals, the Cementerio Union Hebrea Chevet-Ahim, one of only five Jewish cemeteries in Cuba, awaits a rare visit. More than a dozen University of Miami Hillel students arrive to pay their respects at the Sephardic cemetery, established in 1942 for Jews from Spain and Portugal. The final holy resting place is hidden just down the road from the Ashkenazi cemetery, the oldest Jewish cemetery in Cuba, built for Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia in 1906.
The tucked-away location is common, says UM student Josh Stoller on this clear and hot Sunday morning. This is his first full day in Cuba for UM Hillel’s Alternative Spring Break trip to the communist island that was so close but off limits to most Americans for decades.
“For security reasons,” Stoller, a junior majoring in electrical engineering, explains, “Jewish cemeteries and synagogues across many parts of the world, including the U.S., are generally inconspicuous and the directions unmarked to help prevent anti-Semitic attacks.”
With its crumbling, unkempt grounds, tombstones of broken marble and tile, and cracked cement, the cemetery in the suburbs of Havana has an unsettling likeness to the Jewish cemeteries and synagogues across the U.S. that have been recent targets of vandalism.
But the shabbiness of this Jewish cemetery has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. There just aren’t enough Jews left in Cuba to repair and maintain the grounds for the deceased, or the Jewish community centers and places of worship for the living. From a peak of nearly 25,000 in the 1920s, the Cuban-Jewish population fell sharply after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution turned Cuba into a communist and atheist state. Many of Cuba’s Jews joined the mass exodus of Cubans following the revolution, and today, the Jewish population on the island stands at just about 1,200.
Though the Cuban government owns the cemetery land, the Patronato Casa de la Comunidad Hebrea de Cuba, or the Patronato, as the Cuban Jewish Community is called, must pay to maintain the grounds and relies on donations to do so. Without a single rabbi on the island, the Patronato even has to fly in a rabbi from Chile for Passover and the occasional wedding.
“In Cuba, our students experienced a vibrant Jewish and secular culture while being keenly aware of the political implications that communism has had on the Cuban people,” says UM Hillel’s Campus Rabbi and Jewish Chaplain Lyle Rothman, who traveled with the group during their seven-day trip.
The UM Hillel students, ranging in age from 18 to 23 and pursuing majors from music therapy to accounting and pre-med to pre-law, spent the break visiting and paying their respects at Jewish cemeteries, cooking meals for Jewish seniors, and enjoying Rikudim dances with teens and young adults from the temple.
They also visited historical and cultural sites, including the Plaza de la Revolucion, with its landmark 100-ton steel outlines of revolutionary figures Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, the artist communities of Muraleando and Callejon de Hamel, the national Havana Club rum factory and the town of Viñales in the western province of Pinar del Rio, with its breathtakingly distinct rounded mountains.
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