Items in today’s column include:
*‘Jeronimo’ documentary compares Korean, Jewish Diasporas
*Political bytes
*Coming our way
By Donald H. Harrison
‘Jeronimo’ documentary compares Korean, Jewish Diasporas
SAN DIEGO – Among more than 170 films from 29 countries that will be screened at the 20th San Diego Asian Film Festival Nov. 7-16 is one about Koreans living in Cuba. The story in the view of filmmaker Joseph Juhn has parallels to the Jewish experience in Diaspora.
Jeronimo honors a Korean Cuban who attended law school with Fidel Castro, and then rose to positions of importance, including as a vice minister, in Castro’s government. The 93-minute documentary is a study of how people forced by economics or warfare to leave their homeland struggle to never forget it, while at the same time working hard to become accepted as citizens of their new country.
The names and languages are different, but it is a situation that Jews can well understand.
Jeronimo will be shown at 3:10 p.m. on Saturday, November 9, at the UltraStar Mission Valley.
There are numerous interviews with the family of Jeronimo Lim – his Korean name was Lim Eun Jo—as well as with historians and other academicians about the experience of the Korean community in Cuba, which today is estimated to number approximately 900 persons.
Filmmaker Juhn also interviewed Rabbi Joshua Stanton of East End Temple in New York about the impact of diaspora on a people. “The heart of diaspora is pain,” said the rabbi. “You can’t be in your ancestral homeland” nor can you practice the religion or culture that you want to. “But what comes from the pain is that you can change some of the traditions and adapt them and modernize them and make them relevant wherever you are.”
The rabbi, who lives in Juhn’s hometown of New York City, suggested that people who live in diaspora are heroes. “They are the ones who have to work hard to preserve the traditions. It seems that many Koreans living in Cuba were on a sacred journey to find themselves.”
The same might be said of Juhn, who seemed to grow in Korean cultural awareness as the film progressed. The documentary began with a fortunate coincidence. Following his arrival in Cuba, Juhn’s taxicab driver Patricia Lim clearly was of Korean ancestry, just as he was. She brought him to meet her mother, Cristina, and brother Nelson, and there he learned about her father Jeronimo, grandfather Lim Cheon Taek, and grandmother Gudelia. The fact that Jeronimo was a contemporary of Castro’s and knew Che Guevara was fascinating to the young filmmaker.
He returned to Cuba seven months later with a film crew and learned that in 1905, 1,033 Koreans sailed for the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, enticed by advertisements that asserted “Mexico in North America is equal to the United States n wealth and civilization. There are many rich men and few poor men. Korean young men, come!”
The advertisement was a terrible lie. When the Koreans arrived in the Yucatan, they were sent to 22 plantations to harvest henequen, also known as Yucatan sisal, which is used to make twine, rope, bags, hammocks , and simple shoes. Armed guards were posted all around the haciendas to prevent any of the workers from running off before their four-year contracts expired. Not long after contracts were up in 1909, Japan invaded Korea, turning it into a colony. The Koreans in Mexico decided to stay. Eleven years later, there was news that they could have jobs in the sugar cane fields of Cuba. In 1921, approximately 300 of them sailed to Cuba, disembarking in the port of Manati.
While many Korean families expected their sons to work just as soon as they completed elementary school, Lim Cheon Taek was impressed by his son’s determination to continue his education, and permitted him to do so. Jeronimo became the first Korean in Cuba to finish high school, to go to college, and to law school.
His father was anxious that the Koreans in Cuba retain their language and culture, and pass it onto the next generations. He formed the first National Korean Association of Cuba through which donations were made to the Korean resistance back home.
At the end of World War II, with the defeat of Japan, Korea regained its independence, albeit to be divided into a communist North Korea and a democratic South Korea. The yolk of Japanese colonization thrown off, the Koreans in Cuba no longer had a collective mission. They began to turn to focus on their own situations in Cuba.
Jeronimo was attracted to the revolutionary ideals of Castro; while his father, meanwhile, continued to focus on the Korean motherland. While Jeronimo talked of Engels and Marx, his father corresponded with members of the Cheondogyo Church in Korea. There was a split between the generations.
On the 50th anniversary of Korean independence in 1995, Jeronimo traveled to Korea where he was profoundly moved by the experience. He was in a land where he was accepted for who he was; he did not feel that as a foreigner he had to prove himself.
Eventually, Jeronimo’s father was buried at the National Cemetery in Seoul, his efforts to help the Korean resistance during Japanese colonial days honored.
Jeronimo, who was a natural leader, decided to pick up where his father left off. Although Cristina, his wife, declared that he never wavered from his Revolutionary ideals, he also tried to unify the descendants of the Koreans who had come to the island so long ago. He tried to form a second Korean National Association of Cuba, but he was unable to gain recognition for the organization — one suspects because of quiet opposition from the North Korean Embassy in Havana. Nevertheless, in 2001, his community was able to have a monument constructed in Manati with two pillars covered by a common Korean roof.
Jeronimo explained at a dedication ceremony that 80 years before, “here at this very pier, the steam ship Tamaulipas landed carrying 300 Korean immigrants in its heart who stepped on the same land on which we today erect this monument. Those 300 Koreans suffered many sorrows and hardships. But neither their hearts nor minds wavered in their desire to create families that continue the culture and history of their homeland. This monument is the symbol. It symbolizes the Cuban and the Korean people. The two columns represent the strength of these two people so that their brotherhood may continue through eternity; so that this brotherhood always becomes stronger for the happiness of both nations.”
Many Jews who will watch this film will empathize with the feeling that two countries can simultaneously tug at your heart. More information about Jeronimo and the many other offerings of the 20th Annual San Diego Asian Film Festival is available by clicking here.
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Political bytes
San Diego City Council President Georgette Gomez announced that Mayor Mark Arapostathis has endorsed her bid to succeed Congresswoman Susan Davis in the 53rd Congressional District. The mayor said Gomez will “serve with integrity and always with the interests of families and community in mind.”
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Coming our way
Lee & Frank Goldberg are the season sponsors of the upcoming season of the San Diego Opera, which will begin with Aida, and then move on to One Amazing Night, Hansel & Gretel, Aging Magician, The Barber of Seville and The Rising and The Falling.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com