The trouble, if that’s the word, began with a text from Havana: “I met someone!”

My son, Ben, was 26 and on his third trip to Cuba. He was there for the music and the adventure and to practice his ever-improving Spanish. The someone was Tatiana, a Cuban woman he met at a bar the night before New Year’s Eve, 2015. She was a few years younger than Ben and felt lucky to be talking to an American so interested in everyday Cuban life. I could tell from Ben’s voice when we finally talked that he was in deep. 

The situation was going somewhere fast, but I was stuck on a single thought: Although Tatiana followed a religious practice, it was not Judaism. It was Afro-Cuban Yoruba, I later learned, brought to the island from West Africa. 

Instead of greeting the news of my son’s happiness with joy, I flinched, perhaps because I’m a practicing Jew and the son of a Holocaust survivor. Over the years, I had drifted toward a Modern Orthodox shul, attending Shabbat and holiday services regularly as well as the occasional weekday minyan. I’ve mostly been alone on that journey, but as I saw it, one of my duties in this life was to keep the chain of our family’s Jewish ancestry from breaking. Never mind that more than 60 percent of American Jews who have married since 2010 have wed someone who isn’t Jewish. The traditionalist in me felt that those statistics didn’t apply in my case. My father had lost so much of his family during World War II.

The trouble was that I didn’t voice my protest to my son, fearful that such honesty might lead to estrangement.

Ben first met Tatiana after a few beers at a bar in Havana. He was there with two travel buddies from college. She had just said goodbye to a group of friends, who were moving on, when Ben decided to strike up a conversation with her. Outside the bar, away from the air-conditioning and the music, Ben thought she was pretty. Mostly, though, he saw the encounter as an opportunity to practice his Spanish and get another glimpse into Cuban life. 

They spent the rest of the night talking into the early morning. By the time his flight home departed some five days later, the two had spent parts of every day together. He had even met her parents at a neighborhood pork roast on New Year’s Day. 

“It felt like a real connection,” Ben later told me. 

But still, they were nearly 2,000 miles apart. How would it work? They reconnected using a cheap international phone app while Tatiana waited three months for her U.S. tourist-visa application to be approved. It was denied. Ben found a long weekend to return. But still. He couldn’t afford to keep flying down. That’s when they hatched an alternative, if arduous, plan to get Tatiana to the U.S. legally. It took nearly six months, as she traveled halfway across the world in order to cross the Texas border, where she was........

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