By Mark D. Zimmerman
MELVILLE, New York — Cuban leader Fidel Castro died last week at the age of 90. What was Fidel Castro’s first significant connection to Jews and Judaism?
A. Until 1973, Israel and Cuba had diplomatic relations, and one of the strongest ties was in the area of agricultural assistance provided by Israel to Cuban farmers. Much of this connection came through the Kibbutz Movement, both because of the expertise of the kibbutz farming industry as well as the socialist underpinnings of the kibbutz movement. As a result of these connections, in 1966 Fidel Castro arranged for his oldest son, Fidel Ángel Castro Diaz-Balart, to spend six months on Kibbutz Ramat Yochanan. In order to keep this quiet, the young man used the name Ángel Diaz-Balart and did not disclose his relationship to the Cuban leader.
B. Raised as a Catholic, Castro recalled that every year at Easter time, he would hear that “God is dead” because the Jews killed him. He said he didn’t know what a Jew was, other than a bird with a big nose that was called a Jew bird, so he assumed a bird had killed God. He said that this childhood experience contributed to his belief that anti-Semitism was wrong and based on ignorance.
C. Rum has been distilled on sugarcane plantations in Central and South America as well as in the Caribbean since the early 1600’s, with Jews playing a prominent role, both as owners of many of these plantations as well as through liquor importing businesses led by Samuel Bronfman and Lewis Rosenstiel among others. In Cuba, one of the first distillers of rum was a Jew named Pedro Diago, known as the father of Cuban rum. When Fidel Castro was 16 years old, he got a job working in the sugarcane fields on Diago’s plantation, and because of the poor pay and working conditions he found there, he organized a strike of the plantation workers. This was the beginning of his involvement in socialist politics, as well as his dislike for capitalists, whom he associated largely with Jews because of Pedro Diago.
D. While there have been some Jews living in Cuba for centuries (including many Marranos who had emigrated from Spain to Cuba and other Caribbean Islands), the population grew significantly in the early 1900’s, with immigration from Turkey after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and as part of the major Eastern European Jewish emigration, particularly after the United States closed their borders to most immigrants in the 1920’s. A number of these Jews, including Fabio Grobart and Enrique Oltuski, played prominent roles in the Cuban revolution, working alongside Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to overthrow the Cuban President Fulgencio Batista.
E. As a boy Fidel Castro learned to play the drums, and by the time he was in high school, he had gained quite a reputation as a performer. At that time Desi Arnaz was just starting out as a bandleader in Havana, and he brought Castro into his band. Many of their gigs were for bar mitzvahs and Jewish weddings. At one bar mitzvah, Castro spontaneously started pounding a rhythmic beat as the bar mitzvah boy’s parents, Anna and Louis, were lifted on chairs. Castro began chanting “Ima Anna, Abba Lou. Ima Anna, Abba Lou,” and the entire crowd chimed in as they circled the parents. Years later, after the Cuban Revolution, Desi Arnaz emigrated to the United States where he gained fame as a singer and bandleader, with his most famous song being one he wrote based on his slightly misremembered gig at that bar mitzvah–Babalú.