RELIGION-CUBA: Deal Allows Jewish Emigration to Israel

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Oct 12 1999 (IPS) - Reports on an agreement to facilitate the emigration of hundreds of Jewish people from Cuba to Israel had elicited no official response in Havana by Tuesday.

Kept under wraps until this week, the outflow of emigrants began around four years ago, Raquel Marichal, a member of the Coordinating Council of the Cuban Hebrew Committee, said in Havana.

She denied, however, that any “secret deal” had been struck by Israel and Cuba.

José Miller, the president of the Hebrew Community Centre, also denied that there was any agreement to facilitate the flow of emigrants to Israel, although he acknowledged that dozens of Jewish families had moved to “several countries” in the past few years.

The story broke Sunday when the London newspaper ‘The Sunday Telegraph’ reported that Havana and Tel Aviv had reached a secret agreement for around 400 Jewish Cubans to emigrate to Israel.

The report was confirmed Monday by an Israeli official who preferred to remain anonymous. But neither the government- monopolised press nor the Castro administration had made any reference to the story as of Tuesday afternoon.

Since Cuba broke off its relations with Israel in September 1973, after the Seven Day war, the permits to leave Cuba and entry visas from Israel were granted through Canada, according to The Sunday Telegraph.

The Israeli official said 400 Cubans were presently living in an immigration centre in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, while 200 others were to be transferred there by next June.

According to the official, the agreement approved by Castro “has a lot to do with his desire to improve relations between Cuba and the United States,” bolster the island’s international image, and secure the lifting of the U.S. embargo against the island.

Margalit Bejerano, with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, meanwhile, attributed the reported migration agreement to Cuba’s thirst for new trading partners after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But local analysts say that rather than a gesture towards Washington, Havana appears to be sending signals to Israel, the only country that backed the United States in the last United Nations General Assembly vote on the blockade against Cuba.

Cuba is betting its stakes on a complete isolation of the United States in the UN General Assembly, as a key step towards achieving the lifting of sanctions that according to the government have meant 65 billion dollars in losses for Cuba in the past 40 years.

While Israel and Cuba have not expressed interest in reestablishing relations, economic ties between the two nations have grown since 1992, when the company Natour of Tel Aviv was authorised to take tourists to the island.

By early 1994, the Israeli group BM had invested 22 million dollars in developing citrus orchards in Cuba. Today, the consortium is growing fruit and participating in the two largest citrus processing plants in Cuba.

A Cuban-Israeli joint venture was created that year to finance 15 textile plants. In fact, Israelis are the second biggest investors in Cuba’s textile industry, after Mexico.

Local analysts point out that if true, the authorisation granted to Jewish Cubans to emigrate to Israel has coincided with the government’s policy of dialogue with the main religions represented in the country, and with a newly strengthened sense of identity among the Jewish community.

By the mid-1990s, some 1,500 Jews were living in Cuba, most of them in Havana. The Jewish community shrunk from around 15,000 people in 1959 to 2,500 in 1965, as a result of the exodus set off by the triumph of the revolution led by Castro.

At first it was the wealthiest families, with links to the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, that fled. They were followed, however, by thousands of business owners when government expropriations were extended to small and medium companies.

A study by the Jewish Chamber of Commerce estimates that 70 percent of Jews in Cuba were involved in large-scale commerce, 15 percent owned large companies, and 10 percent were involved in the production of consumer goods.

Besides seeing their economic interests affected, the Jewish community suffered the impact of the government’s policy towards religion, which for decades was based on the declaration of the Cuban state as athiest, and on the government’s intolerance of any other viewpoint.

Cuba’s support for the Palestinian cause and its opposition to Israeli policy led to fears among some Jews of being labelled Zionists, which in turn led them to withdraw from community activity.

The situation began to change in 1991, when those professing a religion were allowed to join the governing Communist Party. A year later, one of a series of constitutional amendments entailed a ban on any discrimination on the basis of religion.

The Hebrew Community joined Cuba’s General Association of Churches, strengthened its relations with Jewish communities in other Latin American nations and with the Canadian Jewish Congress, and began to refurbish and reopen synagogues.

In the past few years, a Sunday school giving classes in Hebrew and history to more than 100 people, mainly children, was reopened, and the Hebrew Youth Organisation, considered a driving force behind the strengthened identity of the Jewish community, was created.

Local analysts see the February 1994 visit to Cuba by Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, who met with Castro, as a key element in the process of detente between the two countries and the improvement of relations between the Jewish community and the Cuban government.