A primer of good reads, recipes, insights
Want to learn more about Jewish Cuba before you go? Jewish Heritage Travel regularly offers learning tours to Cuba to support interchange with the Jewish people of Cuba. These meaningful educational trips bring to light Jewish heritage, history, and contemporary life, experienced and expressed in the cultural and political context of Cuba.
Enjoy this curated collection that includes book recommendations, a classic Jewish-Cuban recipe, and a must-read essay on Jewish-Cuban identity.
Enjoy it now or bookmark it for later!
Start with an easy 10-minute read…
My Ancestors’ Keys: In Search of the Jews of Cuba
From Revista: The Harvard Review of Latin America. A must-read essay by Ruth Behar, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and author of the travel memoir, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, the bilingual poetry volume, Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé, and the novel, Letters from Cuba. Ruth is also the editor of Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba and the creator of the documentary Adio Kerida: A Cuban Sephardic Journey. (photo: Purim in Cuba, Ruth Behar)
Book Recommendations
The Chosen Island: Jews in Cuba
This book, by one of Jewish Heritage Travel’s Cuban scholars, Maritza Corrales, tells the story of refuge, integration, and regeneration. Through interviews and reliance on archival material, it recounts the lives of thirty six Jewish men and women, who emigrated to or were born in Cuba in the last century, who became part of the Cuban social fabric and whose presence in Cuba after 1959 kept the spirit of Judaism alive. Available through a search from Amazon, AbeBooks, ThirftBooks and others.
Tropical Diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba
Robert Levine interviewed nearly a hundred Cuban Jewish emigrants in the course of writing this book. One reviewer writes, “his use of their words lends the work an especially engaging, lively quality, a vivid reflection of how the immigrants thought and felt and lived.” Tropical Diaspora also contains more than seventy-five rare photographs. If you can get your hands on a copy, it’s well worth it. Available through a search at most of the ubiquitous online booksellers.
Tia Fortuna’s New Home: A Jewish Cuban Journey
In this wonderful book by Ruth Behar, a young Cuban American girl learns the real meaning of home in this poignant story drawing on the real-life history of Cuba’s Sephardic Jews. Ruth is also the author of Across So Many Seas, which tells the story of four generations of girls and their timeless struggle to navigate the world without losing touch with their Judaism.
Both are great gifts for kids, grandkids, and middle-grade students who love to read — or add these to your own kid-lit library.
Brisket Cuban Stlye!
A Jewban Family Tradition: Ropa Vieja
Jennifer Stempel provides a delightful perspective on her Jewish-Cuban identity and shares a family recipe for Ropa Vieja, which, she says, is the Cuban answer to a traditional Jewish brisket.
