Cuban Jewish Kindness: What I Hope Won’t Change

This February I went to Havana to see what I could learn about how the island’s Jewish community is responding to the news of restored political relations between the U.S. and Cuba.

But a few days into my trip, I started to feel ill. My lips suddenly swelled up strangely. I tried not to panic, but I’d never experienced those symptoms and wasn’t sure what to do.

It’s scary to be sick and alone in a foreign country. Will you find a good doctor? Will you get the right medication? Who will keep an eye on you, make sure you’re getting well?

Not that Cuba is a foreign country to me. I was born there. Cuba is my lost home and also the home I’ve recovered through my work as a cultural anthropologist. During the last twenty-five years, I’ve traveled back and forth to document the lives of Cuban Jews through my writing and filmmaking. They have treated me warmly, taking me in like a prodigal daughter. They know I might still be with them had my parents chosen to stay in Cuba after the Revolution.

Usually when I’m in Cuba I dive into my ethnographic work, gather information, listen to stories day and night. But this time I find myself worrying about my puffed-up lips. I wonder whether to bail out, take the first plane back to the U.S.

Why am I so worried? Isn’t Cuba my home?

Finally, I call Adela Dworin, the president of the Jewish community. Adela remembers my family from the years before the Revolution. I’ve spent many hours chatting with her in the library of the Patronato Synagogue, surrounded by all the Jewish books she safeguarded during turbulent years of social change. Still, I am more than a little embarrassed to bother her. She is very busy, meeting and greeting all the American groups descending on the Jewish community in the wake of the opening toward Cuba.

“Adela, my lips are swollen, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Should I just go to the international clinic and be seen by one of the doctors there?”

“No, no. Don’t go there. That’s going to cost you a fortune. Can you stop by at noon? I’ll have my own doctor see you.”

When I arrive at the Patronato, Adela and her doctor are waiting for me in the library. They look concerned. The doctor is a gerontologist. She smiles pleasantly and glances quickly at my lip.

“Looks like an allergic reaction. Have you eaten fish at any restaurants?”

“Yes, at several.”

“That might be the cause. I’ll give you two prescriptions—for an ointment and for some pills.”

“See how easy?” Adela says. “Aren’t you glad you came here instead of going to the clinic?”

I am grateful. It’s reassuring to know that Adela’s own doctor is there to look after me in an emergency.

I obtain the pills for pennies at a state pharmacy. The ointment I find for the equivalent of $10 at an international pharmacy.

Two days later, the swelling of my lips begins to diminish, but only slightly. I am still concerned. I email a friend in Miami who practices holistic medicine. I describe my symptoms and she responds that I’ll feel better if I can get Apis Mellifica tincture, a homeopathic remedy.

After checking in various pharmacies in El Vedado, the neighborhood where I grew up and where I always stay, I learn there’s one pharmacy that specializes in homeopathic remedies. I call and they say they have Apis Mellifica, but to obtain it I must bring a prescription from a doctor who specializes in homeopathy. And I need to come equipped with my own sterilized dark amber glass container. They don’t have receptacles in which to dispense the remedies.

How am I going to find a doctor who specializes in homeopathy? Even if I find the doctor, how am I going to find the dark amber bottles?

I return to the Patronato, but Adela is busy briefing a visiting American Jewish group. I peek inside the communal dining room, where Shabbat meals are served to the congregation. A group of women are gathered and they wave to me.

“Come in, Ruth, come in! Do you want your hair styled?”

It is the Asociación Femenina Hebrea de Cuba, the women’s association. They meet monthly, offering women in the community free manicures, haircuts, styling, and massages, sharing the tourist-donated nail polish, hair mousse, and lotions.

Sara Yaech is styling Marlen Prinstein’s hair while a couple of other women watch and chat with each other.

Sara is Sephardic. When most of the Jews were leaving Cuba in the early 1960s, she was participating in the Literacy Campaign, helping people in the island’s rural hinterland learn to read and write. She and her husband supported the ideals of the Revolution. It was a sad day for them when their son and daughter left Cuba for Israel and Mexico. They have since made peace with this separation and spend part of each year visiting with their children and grandchildren. But Cuba will always be home. It is where their mango trees grow.

Marlen’s story is different. A lawyer by training, she converted to Judaism after marrying David Prinstein, who is the Vice-President of the Jewish community. Now a committed Jew by choice, Marlen has become the leader of the Israeli folk dance club that unites all the generations, and she also helps to run religious services. She was just back from a trip to Miami to visit their two older sons, who left Cuba a few years ago. She obtained permission from both governments to bring her American-born granddaughter, only a year old, for a month-long visit to Cuba. The child prances around joyfully as Marlen gets her hair done

The conversation soon shifts to me and how I am doing. Word has gotten around that Adela’s doctor was brought in to have a look at me.

“I’m better, but there’s a homeopathic remedy I need. The problem is that to get it, I have to get a prescription from a doctor who practices homeopathy. I also need the amber glass bottle for the remedy. I know it’s impossible.”

Marlen barely bats an eye as she says, “My sister-in-law can help you. She’ll be here any minute.”

When her sister-in-law, Rebeca, walks in, I recognize her immediately. We have exchanged pleasantries in the past. I know that she and David Prinstein, her brother, are Jewish on their father’s side. They learned about their heritage from growing up going to Passover seders at the home of their grandparents.

Once she learns of my situation, Rebeca says, “Let’s go right now. I’ll take you to my mother’s house first, she has the amber bottles, and then we’ll go to my father-in-law’s house.”

On Calle Linea we wave down one of the ancient American cars that serve as collective taxis and head to Centro Habana, the part of the city that is mostly in ruins. We get off near the old Chinese neighborhood. The broken streets there are brimming with life, crowded with people walking every which way, and bicycle taxis, and street vendors selling flowers and vegetables.

As soon as we arrive at their home, Rebeca’s sweet-tempered stepfather offers me a bowl of delicious guava fruit in syrup and requests I sit in one of the living room chairs while Rebeca’s mother quickly boils two amber bottles for me. She insists I should have both bottles in case I need them. These are bottles she saved, she doesn’t have any others, and she is happy to give them to me.

Rebeca shows me around the apartment. In the small bedroom I recognize the photos of Brian, a gracious young man active in the Patronato. He was being groomed to be a future leader and chanted at religious services with profound feeling. I often spoke with him and had gone on a visit with him a year ago to the two Jewish cemeteries in Guanabacoa. Now I learn Rebeca is his mother.

“How is Brian?” I ask.

“He’s doing well. He’s happy in Israel. He found a job working with computers, which is what he loves. He’s earning more than he can ever earn here.” Tears fill Rebeca’s eyes. “I miss him so much. He’s my only child.”

Brian’s room has been left untouched, all his drawings and photos pinned to the walls, a shrine to his departure.

She wipes away her tears. “Come, now we go to my father-in-law’s house.”

With the two sterilized amber bottles in hand, we walk a few blocks to meet her father-in-law, José Martínez. He and his wife, who is of Polish Jewish background, live in a modest apartment, their living room cabinets filled with gauze and surgery scissors and homeopathic remedies, the contents labeled by hand.

José proudly shows me his diploma. It is a diploma in veterinary homeopathic medicine.

So I’ve come to see a veterinarian for my health care? Only in Cuba.

The surprise on my face must show.

José says, “I treat animals, but they’re no different from humans. Here, let me write you the prescription. I’m going to give you the Apis and also a prescription for Nux Vomica. It will help you as well. I’ll put your name down as Ruth García. That will be better, so they won’t think you’re a foreigner, because you’re not.”

Like Adela’s gerontologist, he won’t accept payment. He wishes me well and tells me to visit next time I’m in Cuba.

Afterwards, I rush to the pharmacy, which is about to close. I hand over the two amber bottles provided by Rebeca’s mother and the pharmacist fills them with the homeopathic remedies.

“Ruth García, what is your address?” the pharmacist asks.

“Calle 15, número 278,” I say without hesitating.

It’s the address of the apartment in El Vedado where I lived as a child. It’s still my home, in a way. We were just half a block from the Patronato Synagogue. We could see its beautiful arch from our balcony.

Between the medications given to me by Adela’s doctor and José’s homeopathic prescriptions, my lips return to normal and I am feeling like myself again.

By then it’s time to leave Cuba.

Has the trip been a waste? I tell myself no, on the contrary, I have learned something unique that I hadn’t learned before while consciously studying the Cuban Jewish community. I have learned to do things the Cuban way – through friendship and kin networks, through the gift economy, no money changing hands, only kindness. I was woven into the web of the Cuban Jewish community and became part of the tapestry of a people who care for one another and rescue each other for the sake of a shared history. What moves me is that not everyone within the web is Jewish, but all are connected through deep bonds of trust and love.

At the airport, while waiting for our delayed flight to Miami, I run into a group of American Jews. They are from Michigan, it turns out, where I live. Their faces look familiar. I saw them at the Patronato during Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat services. A young man from the group, who works in real estate, says it shocked him to learn that Jews in Cuba are so educated—they’re doctors, engineers, teachers, computer programmers, lawyers—and they live in poverty. How can they stand it?

It’s a sincere question and I wish I could find the words at that moment to answer him lucidly.

All I can think of is how Adela and Marlen and Rebeca and Rebeca’s mother and José all came together in my moment of need and took care of me with such a genuine and humble generosity of spirit.

Will this sense of community survive into the future once a rampant American-style consumer culture takes hold of Cuba?

There is so much that is broken in Cuba. Massive changes are in store as “los americanos” finally return to Cuba, perhaps a little too eagerly, to fix it all.

The loving sense of community among the island’s Jews, and among those fellow Cubans who cherish their presence, is one thing that I hope doesn’t change.

And so I’m left with a prayer for the future: that what is unbroken, fragile, and beautifully humane about this beloved home of mine will find a way to bloom, like a crocus seeking light at the end of a long winter.

APRIL 14, 2015by Ruth Behar

Source: 3200 stories