R. is a fifty-nine year-old man who lives with his family in Santa Clara de Cuba, a city most known as the site of the last battle in the Cuban Revolution and as the final resting place of Che Guevara. The streets of R’s hometown are lined with fading buildings that are crumbling back into the earth. The roads, traveled by bicycles, cars new and antique and horses pulling buggies, are rutted and potholed, though traffic, for want of fuel and spare parts, is light. Lacking jobs, men play dominos while their families live off a dole that allows them just enough to survive.
Santa Clara is neither the most primitive nor the most developed city in Cuba. It lacks Havana’s tourist infrastructure, with its hot running water, burgeoning private restaurants and few functioning flush toilets. At the same time, it does not suffer from the isolation of former sugar center, Trinidad, which today is a UNESCO heritage site lacking any sort of industry to employ the people who remain there. Like many Cuban cities, Santa Clara has a hospital with plenty of doctors and little medicine; stores with plenty of shelves but few products; a surfeit of arable land but no farming – after a fifty-year ban, personal gardening was only legalized a few months ago; and plenty of people but little motivation - if not great disincentive - for them to take responsibility for their own lives.
There are about 25 Jews in Santa Clara, with about another 60-70 living within an hour drive of the city center, and R is the president of the community. And R is a maker of miracles. R dreams up projects – after constituting the community, his first project was the placement of a holocaust memorial in Santa Clara’s postage stamp of a Jewish cemetery. R’s passion lit a spark in American Jews on solidarity missions, who, with the help of an inspired young non-Jewish tour guide, brought funds for the memorial. Visitors carried stones from the market street of the Warsaw Ghetto into Cuba, one by one, to pave the path in front of the modest monument. Even as teens from Atlanta were putting the finishing touches on the memorial, R was already hatching a plan to refurbish the cemetery, repairing the graves and the walls and planting a grove of trees modeled after the grove at Yad Vashem. And as the cemetery project was nearing completion, R was already, in his magnetic, charming way, campaigning for a synagogue and community center building, inspiring donations with his passion and vision for a peaceful, harmonious future. A testament to a vibrant Jewish present is now rising in what is, to all appearances, the epitome of exile at the end of the earth.
There aren’t many people like R in this world, who use their gifts for the benefit of the Jewish community with such skill and panache. And yet as we traveled around the island of Cuba, we met with many leaders of the Jewish community who are curious about their Judaism, passionate about learning and making meaning and devoted to rebuilding connections among Cuban Jews and with the world at large. It’s no small task – though anti-Semitism is not really in issue in Cuba, religious expression has only been legal since 1992. And yet, with change in the air, resourcefulness, creativity and hope prevail.
The self-taught, excitable guide we met at the botanical garden of Cienfuegos, a city in south-central Cuba, unintentionally provided a metaphor for the Cuban experience when he enthusiastically described his favorite plant, bamboo, which was introduced to Cuba decades ago. Bamboo can grow three feet in one day; you can actually watch it grow and flourish.
It doesn’t take much for people to thrive like bamboo. Given the slightest of opportunities, we push our way into the light. Visiting a place like Cuba underscores the drive for survival, prosperity and fulfillment. Yes, decades of a misguided, large-scale socioeconomic experiment have turned the economy upside-down. It is more lucrative in Cuba to be a restroom attendant – a human toilet flusher – than a physician. Yes, laws were written and a secret police established to discourage private enterprise. Yes, the buildings are literally falling apart for want of materials for repair, and fertile fields lie fallow even as capable workers sit on street corners. Certainly many people are entirely dependent on the regime for their subsistence allowance of bread, milk, rice, beans, pork, butter and eggs. (That’s four eggs a month per person.) Still, human beings are incredibly resilient. Creativity is innate, and art flourishes even when things get worse than could ever be imagined. Ambition is instinctual and transcends even the most counterintuitive limitations placed upon it. In the face of exorbitant licensing fees, usurious income taxes and the ever-present threat of imprisonment or execution, the most enterprising Cubans have still begun to open private craft stalls and restaurants. Defying all odds, David’s tiny Jewish community yearns for a better world and a better lot for themselves. Like bamboo shoots, given a little bit of land, a little bit of space and even an unfair shot at a better life, they grow, and grow and grow. Watching hope spring up in the least hospitable of climates makes t’hiyyat hameitim – resurrection of the dead – seem real. Death and despair not the end; they are the necessary precondition for hope and rebirth.
Knesset Israel’s trip to Cuba coincided with the parshiyot that describe Jacob’s sojourn in the household of Lavan. I was volunteered to read Torah last shabbat, and chanting Jacob’s response to his dream – “God was in this place, though I was not aware… How awe-inspiring is this place; this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gateway to heaven.” – was both jarring and inspiring. And furthermore the juxtaposition of Jacob’s journey and travel in Cuba, invited comparison between the journey of our ancestor and the experience of the Cuban people.
Jacob’s journey is framed by dreams: first, having left the house of his father, Jacob dreams of finding comfort in the midst of his anxiety. Angels are ascending and descending a ladder. God is standing at its top, sharing a message of safety and hope with Jacob. Jacob’s initial dream is one of lofty ideals and abstract promises and it accompanies him as he goes into exile from the comforts of home and the habits of ordinary life. He travels with anxiety but also a sense of purpose and hope into the ‘experiment’ of a different sort of life. He expects prosperity and protection, and his dreams are of God. This is the same ethereal, idealistic sort of dream that ostensibly motivated the revolution of 1959.
But Jacob’s experiment works out poorly, to say the least. His trusted uncle turns out to be a shyster of the first order, tricking Jacob into years of hard labor, a disingenuous marriage and menacing indenture. As the years go by, despite all the promises, Jacob is still virtually enslaved to his uncle and father-in-law. He asserts that he has been a good boy throughout, doing everything for the benefit of his employer and holding himself to a higher standard than would an ordinary shepherd. Yet his dreams are changing. No longer does Jacob dream of God; Jacob dreams of sheep, envisioning how to manipulate the rules to increase his personal herds at the expense of his scheming uncle.
Our sages and even the Torah itself are pretty hard on Jacob for that second dream, suggesting that it is this dream that signals to God that it is time for Jacob to go. Materialism has absorbed our otherwise holy, focused ancestor. Yet, after traveling in Cuba, I am no longer eager to condemn Jacob’s dream of a few sheep to call his own or his sudden obsession with gaming the twisted system established by his uncle. When an individual lives a life of privation and compulsory sacrifice, when the path to sustenance is so labored as to be nearly impossible, when enormous energy must be expended in order to put a few extra eggs in the family’s pot or to search out an antibiotic, who can judge that person’s dream of becoming master of his own future? Economic muscle and political power are intimately related. When an individual frees himself of servitude and poverty, he assumes control of his destiny; a people may do the same. Perhaps Jacob’s materialistic dream of sheep is actually a message not of reprimand but of growth: only now that Jacob is ready to take care of himself and his family is he ready to move on. He has grown from dependence into responsibility. It is time for Jacob to use his ingenuity to set the stage for present and future, accepting the risk and welcoming the reward.
Yet Jacob’s journey and Jacob’s dreams are far from complete. There is one long, terrible, frightening night still ahead of him, a night during which, alone, he will struggle with a demon, perhaps sent by others or by his own conscience. He wrestles all night with this being, rolling in the dust, never sure of whether or how he will emerge. Jacob will not be the same as he was before the journey, but no one ever is. I fear that Cuba is heading in the direction of a long, dark night. Disorganized liberalizations of the economy remove some of its safety net. The secret police seem to have fewer eyes and ears than ever before. And the reemergence of a class society (instead of all have-nots, Cuba now has have-nots and have-a-little-bit-mores) inspires petty crime. I doubt Cuba will long remain as ‘safe’ as it is today, and I am sure that whatever transitions are coming will involve painful moments for its citizens. Perhaps there is no other way.
By traveling to Cuba and by supporting its people – through personal connection with our fellow Jews and their institutions - we provide a taste of that hope. Our presence is as welcome as our presents. Though Knesset Israel will not be leading another solidarity mission for at least two or three years, I would encourage participation in other trips that take American Jews to see not only Havana but also other parts of Cuba. Knesset Israel is now a part of the Jewish network that sends aid to Cuba; though direct mail is prohibitively expensive, we are able to send packages of toiletries, medication, school supplies, books and the like with other groups planning missions. And finally, I believe that we have a moral obligation to lobby in the United States against the embargo on financial transactions with Cuba. That policy is only providing a convenient excuse for the Castro regime to oppress the Cuban people. To take action that necessarily loosens Castro’s economic stranglehold on the people of the island is to give the Cubans more freedom and control over their destiny.
We must remember throughout whatever happens in Cuba over the next few years that Jacob’s nighttime struggle is not permanent. The Torah tells us, as day broke, as it eventually does, the sun shone for him for the first time since he first left his parents’ house. Jacob’s unquenchable spirit and his remarkable passion set him up for a new destiny. No longer Jacob the Trickster, he is also Israel, the one who fights with God and with men and prevails. Though his trials are far from over, he once again experiences light and hope. And in bringing light and hope to our brothers and sisters in Cuba, we find ourselves inspired.
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