I wrote this in 2008 after I visited Cuba on a Jewish humanitarian trip. I never found a publisher for it, so I am finally posting it here now. Cuba is much in the news now in 2026 with its economic collapse and halting steps toward a more free-market system. My opinion remains the same: Cuba is a land of unlimited human and economic potential, strangled under the boot of its political system. 

The place was jumpin’ in the 1950s. Temples expanded with new buildings and programs, the community collected funds for Israel, the descendants of American, European and Middle Eastern immigrants were respected professionals who built businesses that kept the economy growing.

The United States in the Eisenhower era? No—Cuba, a thriving community of 15,000 Jews until the Revolution of 1959 resulted in 90 percent of the Jewish population fleeing. After the new government takeover, churches and temples closed and the religious memory withered, kept alive in the immigrant population that settled a world and 90 miles away in South Florida and elsewhere.

Yet like embattled Jewish communities everywhere, a spark of Jewish identity remained in Havana and smaller cities. In the 1990s, the government eased restrictions on religious observance and Havana’s Jewish community gradually returned to more open activity. Smaller communities across the island also began to reopen.

The US embargo against Cuba severely restricts Americans’ ability to visit Cuba, but it can be done legally. One way is through a religious mission, licensed by the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

That’s how I satisfied a long curiosity about Cuba with a week-long trip there in June 2008 with a group led by Miriam Saul, a Cuba native who moved to Atlanta in the early 1960s and has led almost 30 licensed trips in the last eight years for the Cuba-America Jewish Mission, a non-profit group in California. I first contacted Miriam in February 2007, and signed on for the June 2008 mission.

While the flight from Miami to Havana takes less than 90 minutes, the psychological and official distance is vast. I began to realize the foreignness of the place when I started collecting donations before the trip. The license is based on a religious, humanitarian purpose, and detailed instructions from Miriam described what the Cubans needed most. Religious goods, I learned, were at the bottom of the list (no more kippot, please! I had visions of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)