the sweetest tongue

A Kinship of Diasporas

Sunday, February 4th, 2007 | family issues, journal, puerto rican

In high school and middle school in Puerto Rico, most of my best friends were Jewish. This, in the context of a 85% Roman Catholic population, with the other 15% being mostly Protestant, does catch some people off guard.

“Well, that’s just weird.”

“Isn’t everyone there Roman Catholic?”

Afterwards, I always explain that my friends were Jewbans, and that after the Cuban Communist Revolution, a majority of Jews left Cuba, once a thriving community 15,000 strong in Havana alone. Most of the people who left Cuba settled in Florida, but quite a few settled in other Caribbean nations, including Puerto Rico.

In 8th grade, I remember the very first party I was invited to was my friend Michael’s Bar Mitzvah. I had no idea what a Bar Mitzvah was back then, having just come back from Singapore, where I was led to believe that Jews were mostly killed in the Holocaust, and that they lived in Israel. (No kidding.) In the five years I spent in Saint John’s School, a non-sectarian Pre-K - 12 school in the Condado of San Juan, I learned two truths:

1. Cliques and social power in school is overrated.
2. Jewish mothers are a force to be reckoned with.

Whenever I recount these stories, I am reminded of how similar the movement has been for Chinese people. Before the Revolution in Cuba, the barrio chino (Chinatown) in Havana was the largest in Latin America. After the revolution, a large part of the populace also moved to South Florida and other parts of the Caribbean, notable Puerto Rico, where they settled in the town of Ponce, and Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.

Two years ago, the oldest living Chinese Cuban expatriate passed away in Ponce. I remember my dad driving our family down to Ponce in our childhood, where we had to go visit this great woman who came from Cuba, started her own business and became successful, and got my own dad started in his own business. The last time I saw her, she had Alzheimer’s, and I remember my dad teary-eyed as he spoke to her. Alzheimer’s is just one of those sad, cruel diseases.

I decided to post about this today because I came across an article in the New York Times about the remaining Jewish community in Cuba. A few months ago, a professor friend of mine requested that I write down what I remember about the Chinese communities in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. I don’t know how much I can write down in terms of concrete evidence, but I hope someone can pick up the strands.

Here are two quotes, the first from the New York Times Article, and the second from the CHicago Tribune:

After Mr. Castro took power and nationalized private business and property, 90 percent of the Jewish population, many of them business owners, fled the island, and the remaining 10 percent were largely not observant.

The boom ended, however, when Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution seized private businesses, sending tens of thousands of business-minded Chinese fleeing, mainly to the United States.

Articles referenced and found:
In Cuba, Finding a Tiny Corner of Jewish Life [New York Times]
Asian Mothers are Pushy, Jewish Mothers are Needy [Vis.a.Vis]
Chinatowns in Latin America [Answers.com]
Chinatown is fading with age in Cuba [Cubanet]

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