CU Jewish film
January 29, 2002

Miami Herald - When her Cuban-Jewish father called to say he was returning to Cuba after four decades in exile, Rhonda L. Mitrani knew instinctively what her role should be -- chronicler of a historic, emotional moment in her family's life. ``It came as a big surprise from one moment to the next,'' says the 28-year-old filmmaker from Miami Beach who was then working in post-production at Miramax in New York. Mitrani followed her parents, Elias and Aida Mitrani, and three other Cuban-Jewish couples from Miami Beach -- Sergio and Rosita Zelcer, Luis and Cookie Stabinski, and Fabio and Male Nick -- on the 1998 trip. From their experience reconnecting with the homeland of their youth, Mitrani made the 60-minute documentary Cuba Mia. ``This was one of biggest moments of their lives and I wanted to give something back to them,'' Mitrani says. ``The film is about nostalgia and displaced identity. They were all searching for something very personal.'' Cuba Mia is one of two documentaries on Cuban-Jewish identity showing this week on the Miami Film Festival roster. The other, Adio Kerida, titled after a popular Sephardic song, chronicles the many trips to Cuba of anthropologist Ruth Behar, a University of Michigan professor and book author who says she is ``obsessed with going back and figuring out what my connection is to Cuba.'' Both films spotlight the identity issues of the thriving Cuban-American Jewish community in South Florida, which has its own synagogues, cultural clubs and social institutions. The community grew from the mass exodus of most of the 15,000 Jews in Cuba after the communist regime confiscated their businesses. Forty years later, the four couples in Mitrani's film are on a highly structured mission to deliver donated prayer books and medicine to synagogues in Cuba through Jewish Solidarity, a Miami-based group that often makes such trips to the island. The couples tour Havana and Santiago de Cuba with an official guide and encounter a range of emotions as they reconcile the Cuba of today with the Cuba of their childhood memories. ``The trip was, I hate to use the word, surreal,'' Mitrani says. It also was ``bittersweet because they've been preserving this childhood, their memories of a Cuba where they felt they all belonged,'' but there were some moments in which ``they felt like tourists and felt no attachment.'' ``It's a very delicate, sensitive return to a place they've longed to see for years,'' Mitrani says. For Behar, 45, her many return trips to Cuba in the past decade have been a quest for lost childhood memories she can never recover. The author of the essay collection The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Beacon Press), Behar left Cuba with her family when she was 5. Her parents settled in New York, her grandparents in Miami Beach. Her parents have often told her about the family's long walks along El Malecón, the famous Havana seawall that wraps around the city's edge like an abrazo, an embrace between long-lost loved ones. Certainly, there are photographs of Ruth, ``a happy child,'' in her Havana home. Yet Behar cannot remember her childhood nor the Cuba of yesterday. ``How I wish I could recall something,'' she says in her wistful narration of the 90-minute documentary. Some of the most interesting aspects of Behar's story draw on the heritage of her parents, who fled Europe in the 1920s and arrived in Cuba ``at a time when the United States was closing its doors.'' Cuba opened its doors, Behar says, because the government wanted to ``whiten'' the island's population and so it welcomed white European immigrants. Her mother, an Askenazi Jew, spoke Yiddish. Her father, a Sephardic Jew, spoke Spanish. Their union was thought of as an ``intermarriage.'' Behar titled the documentary in Sephardic, in a `mispelled' version of ``Adiós Querida'' (Goodbye, Dear Love) in Spanish, ``because it's the way Sephardic Jews write Ladino or Judeo-Spanish. ``Sephardic Jews preserved the Spanish language during centuries of exile after their expulsion from Spain in the 15th Century. They used the Hebrew alphabet to write Spanish. At the turn of the 20th Century, when they began to write Ladino or Judeo-Spanish in the Roman alphabet, they used the `k' rather than the `qu' of the Spanish language,'' Behar says. ``By titling my film Adio Kerida, I wanted to call attention to the way Sephardic Jews connect to Spain and the Spanish language, while at the same time being distinct as a people because of their Jewish heritage and their longing for memory of the beloved land they had to leave behind.'' The documentary, culled from four trips Behar made to Cuba between December of 1999 and last year, is ``a little bit of a friendly argument between me and my father,'' Behar says in an interview from her home in Ann Arbor. ``He doesn't think we should look back. We live here now in the U.S.A., he says. My idea is no, maybe there is some way to return, in memory, in sentiment,'' she says. The film, ``a peace offering to my father,'' also includes footage of interviews with members of the Cuban-Jewish community in Miami, including Samy, the famous hairdresser to the stars, whose father was a Sephardic Jew. But some of the most touching scenes are filmed in Cuba as Behar visits people and places once dear to her parents, as well as members of the dwindling Jewish community. Only about 1,000 Jews remain on the island, and many are immigrating to Israel, which is welcoming and sponsoring them, Behar says. In one scene, Behar meets a man also named Behar who used to be a childhood friend of her father.  The man sends Behar's father a warm greeting via the daughter's videotape. In another scene, Behar embraces and talks with Caro, the black woman who took care of her when she was a child. ``I am Jewish because I am Cuban'' Behar says. ``My family survived because Cuba let them in. If Cuba had not, my family would have perished in the Holocaust. I have this debt. I owe this to Cuba.''