Sephardic Jews of Cuba: the Ottoman Community in Havana

Cuba had three Jewish arrivals, in three waves, and — as in Argentina and Panama — they did not merge.

Americans came after 1898, Sephardim from the Ottoman world came from about 1904, and Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe came from the 1920s. Each built its own institutions, and each buried its dead separately.

The Sephardim were the largest of the three for much of the period and are the least written about. They came from Istanbul, İzmir, Edirne, Silivri, Tekirdağ, Salonica and Rhodes, they spoke Judeo-Spanish, and they went into Cuba as pedlars and small traders because — this is the point that explains everything else — they could already understand the language.

There is also an older layer, and a Caribbean connection that reaches back to our Haiti page.

Was there a colonial Jewish presence?

Conversos were in Cuba from the beginning.

Luis de Torres, Columbus’s interpreter, was a converso and is traditionally said to have settled on the island — the story is old, it is repeated everywhere, and the detail should be treated as tradition rather than record.

Havana became the assembly point for the treasure fleets and one of the great commercial cities of the Spanish Atlantic, and Portuguese New Christian merchants worked it as they worked Cartagena and Panama.

Cuba fell under the Inquisition tribunal of Cartagena de Indias from 1610, and — as set out on our Panama and Colombia page — the surviving Cartagena case material is largely in Madrid, at the Archivo Histórico Nacional, not in the Caribbean.

There is no continuity between this layer and anything later.

The Saint-Domingue refugees, 1791–1809

When the Haitian Revolution began in 1791, French planters and their households fled to eastern Cuba — to Santiago de Cuba and the Guantánamo region — in large numbers, bringing coffee cultivation with them.

Jewish families were among them. Then in 1809, after Napoleon invaded Spain, the Spanish authorities expelled the French from Cuba, and something like ten thousand of them moved on to New Orleans.

So for this group Cuba was a way-station of roughly fifteen years. If you have a New Orleans family appearing around 1809, Santiago de Cuba is the intermediate step and Saint-Domingue is the origin.

Where did the Ottoman Sephardim come from?

The modern Sephardi community begins around 1904, and it grew through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire — the Young Turk revolution of 1908 and the conscription of non-Muslims that followed, the Balkan Wars, and the First World War. Our Turkey page sets out those departures from the other end.

They came from Istanbul, İzmir, Edirne, Silivri, Tekirdağ (Rodosto), Salonica and Rhodes, and they founded Chevet Ahim in Havana in 1914 — the first Sephardi congregation in Cuba.

Why Cuba, and why it worked

Because Ladino is Spanish.

A Judeo-Spanish speaker arriving in Havana could trade, negotiate and read a contract within weeks. That is a decisive advantage, and it is exactly the advantage the Haketía-speaking Moroccans had in Argentina. It made the Cuban Sephardim mobile and commercially effective from the start, and it took a great many of them out of Havana.

They spread across the island as pedlars and then shopkeepers: Camagüey, Santa Clara, Cienfuegos, Matanzas, Manzanillo, Ciego de Ávila, Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba all had Sephardi families and, in several cases, their own small institutions. This provincial dispersal is the least documented part of the subject.

What was “Hotel Cuba”?

A great many Jews who arrived in Cuba in the 1920s never intended to stay.

The United States imposed immigration quotas in 1921 and 1924, and Cuba became a waiting room: a place to live, work and establish a record while queuing for a US visa. The phrase used at the time was “Hotel Cuba.”

For a genealogist this matters enormously. A family may appear in Cuban records for two years and then vanish into the United States — and the Cuban record may be the only document of the journey between Istanbul or Salonica and New York.

Do not assume a short Cuban residence is a dead end. It is often the missing link.

Three communities, separate institutions

As in Argentina, establish which group your family belonged to before searching:

United Hebrew Congregation (1904/1906) — the American community, English-speaking
Chevet Ahim (1914) and later the Centro Hebreo Sefaradí — the Ottoman Sephardim, Ladino-speaking
Centro Israelita and Adath Israel (1925) — the Ashkenazim, Yiddish-speaking

The separation extended to the ground. The Jewish cemeteries at Guanabacoa, outside Havana, have distinct Sephardi and Ashkenazi burial grounds — so, exactly as in Buenos Aires, Tunis and Vienna, the cemetery a person lies in identifies the community they belonged to, and therefore which records to search.

The community reached perhaps fifteen thousand people by the 1950s, across all three groups.

The ***St Louis*, 1939**

In May 1939 the liner SS St Louis arrived at Havana carrying 937 Jewish refugees from Germany, most holding Cuban landing permits that the government had invalidated. Cuba refused to admit them. So did the United States and Canada.

The ship returned to Europe, where the passengers were distributed among four countries; a substantial number of those who went to the continental countries were later murdered.

It is the single best-known fact about Jewish Cuba and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than glossed. Cuba admitted many thousands of Jewish refugees in this period and turned this ship away.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum holds the full passenger list with the fate of each passenger.

1959, and Miami

After the revolution of 1959 something like ninety per cent of Cuba’s Jews left, most of them for Miami. The businesses that had been built over fifty years were nationalised along with everybody else’s.

The Cuban Jewish community of South Florida — self-described, half-seriously, as Jubans — is substantial, has its own congregations and organisations, and holds much of the memory and many of the documents of the Cuban community. For most researchers it is a more productive place to enquire than Cuba itself.

Around five hundred to a thousand Jews remain in Cuba today, principally in Havana.

What records survive?

In Cuba

Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Havana.

Registro Civil — Cuban civil registration from 1885, which covers the entire period of the Sephardi arrival. Births, marriages and deaths.

Registro de Extranjeros and immigration records — the arrival documentation for a community that arrived by sea over a defined period.

Catholic parish registers for the colonial centuries.

Guanabacoa cemeteries — Sephardi and Ashkenazi grounds, partially documented by visiting projects.

The Patronato (Beth Shalom), Adath Israel and the Centro Hebreo Sefaradí hold what survives of the community records.

Outside Cuba — often better

JDC Archives — the Joint Distribution Committee was heavily involved in Cuba, above all with the transmigrants of the 1920s and the refugees of the 1930s. Catalogued, indexed and online. This is the single most productive archive for this subject.

HIAS records, for the same reason.

United States immigration records — because so many Cuban arrivals moved on to the US, the American records frequently capture the family, with Cuba as the last place of residence. Key West, Tampa, Miami and New York arrivals.

Cuban Jewish organisations in Miami, including the Cuban Hebrew Congregation, which hold family papers, photographs and memory.

At the origin

The Ottoman end is set out in detail on our Turkey page: the Italian consular registers of İzmir, the community registers now at the CAHJP in Jerusalem, Minna Rosen’s cemetery survey, and the Ottoman population registers.

For the colonial layer, the Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid (Inquisición) and the Archivo General de Indias, Seville.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Margalit Bejarano has done the serious work on the Cuban Sephardim and it has not been much built on, particularly in English.

The provincial communities are undocumented. Sephardi families ran shops across the whole island, and outside Havana almost nothing has been recorded.

The transmigrant generation is a genealogical gap. Families who spent two or three years in Cuba between the Ottoman Empire and the United States appear in Cuban records that nobody searches, because researchers on the American side do not know to look there.

The Guanabacoa cemeteries have never been fully transcribed, and they are the clearest surviving record of who was in Cuba and which community they belonged to.

The Saint-Domingue Jewish refugees in Santiago have not been identified.

Organisations and repositories

JDC Archives and HIAS — the most productive holdings

Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Havana; the Patronato, Adath Israel and Centro Hebreo Sefaradí, Havana

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — St Louis documentation

Cuban Hebrew Congregation and the Cuban Jewish organisations of South Florida

Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem — for the Ottoman community records at the origin

Help us find records

Cuba is well documented in the American archives and poorly documented on the island. We are looking for:

Transcriptions or photographs from the Guanabacoa cemeteries, particularly the Sephardi ground
Records of the provincial Sephardi communities — Camagüey, Santa Clara, Cienfuegos, Manzanillo, Guantánamo and the rest
Chevet Ahim and Centro Hebreo Sefaradí congregational records
Family papers documenting the move from Istanbul, İzmir, Edirne, Silivri, Tekirdağ, Salonica or Rhodes to Cuba
Documentation of the transmigrant generation who passed through Cuba to the United States in the 1920s

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Cuban Sephardi research is usually done outside Cuba. The JDC and HIAS archives, the US immigration records and the Miami community will often answer the question faster than the Havana archives will, and the trail then runs back to Istanbul, İzmir, Salonica or Rhodes, where our Turkey page takes over.

The commonest mistake is treating a short Cuban residence as a dead end when it is frequently the only record of the journey. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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