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In the rundown streets of Guantanamo in southeastern Cuba, a hardy Jewish grandmother in sneakers makes her way through the neighborhood to pick up rations. Barefoot boys come out to play street soccer. Rusty tractors, old model cars, rat-a-tat motorbikes and trotting horses yield a river of staccato noise. The setting sun behind tropical clouds lights the scene in melancholy silver.
A decade ago, on a family trip to Cuba, documentary filmmaker Yael Bridge saw these scenes and learned that a community of some 45 Jews lived in this unlikely place. Six months later, she returned with a film crew.
Her 13-minute film, “Los Últimos Judíos de Guantánamo (The Last Jews of Guantanamo),” completed during a 2023 Jewish Film Institute residency, will premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival on July 27. It is part of a 79-minute program of short films focusing on Jews of color called “Peripheral Visions.”
In the intervening years, Bridge completed two other full-length productions: “Saving Capitalism” (2017), starring Berkeley economist Robert Reich, and “The Big Scary S-Word” (2020), a documentary about socialism in 21st-century America.
But her short film about the Guantanamo Jewish community has always been a passion project.
“I was curious as to what Jewish life could look like at such a far remove and surprised at how simple their standard of living was,” said Bridge, a resident of Fort Bragg in Mendocino County. “It’s so very low-tech. Donkeys and horses and roads that were hardly paved, like going back in time. But I found it really beautiful.”
Bridge, 41, also was interested in how Judaism functioned in a country that embraced state socialism and suppressed all religions until the latter policy was reversed in 1992.
“I wondered how people defined community in a society that was trying to flatten hierarchies and unite everyone under an inclusive ideology,” she said.
By 2015, the internet had finally arrived for Cubans, but the practices of the Guantanamo Jews to express their identity remained the same: Shabbat dinners at the informal congregation on the second floor of the home of the group’s lay leader, Rodolfo Mizrahi.
Bridge said she hopes viewers of the film will understand how important it is to find community, wherever they live.
“Judaism is a really old religion and culture, and has a gravitational force,” she said. “People want reasons to gather and eat and dance to the same songs. That spirit is hard to diminish. It will always survive. That’s what I was trying to capture.”
On her third visit to Guantanamo, Bridge was also able to film a b’nai mitzvah ceremony for two octogenarian women. That event is a centerpiece of this poignant peek into a community that has held fast to the meaning they find in Jewish tradition.
One of the two women, Lidia Perez, who prepares for her ceremony with the help of Mizrahi’s Hebrew-speaking son Rodolfo Cesar Mizrahi, brims with emotion when she says that becoming a bat mitzvah is “something I never imagined could happen.”
What Bridge’s direction captures best is the warmth of the community and the tenderness and patience with which elders are treated. The b’nai mitzvah is a multigenerational gathering as well as multiracial (as is the general population of Cuba).
Sadly, the community is also a shrinking one, as many have made aliyah over the past decade due to the seemingly intractable economic decline of the nation at large. The migration included Rodolfo Mizrahi and all or most of his immediate family — an almost unimaginable tragedy for those who, like this reporter, personally witnessed his leadership in Cuba. In 2019, Mizrahi spearheaded a two-day public celebration of the 90th anniversary of the Guantanamo Jewish community, which in hindsight may have been its last hurrah.
“The building where the synagogue is will be maintained for the use of the Jewish community of Guantanamo for as long as there are still Jews there who want to uphold our traditions,” Mizrahi said in a recent email to J. from Israel. “That is my decision, and even though there are few left, due to the exodus that has taken place because of the difficult economic situation in Cuba, those who remain are making a great effort to carry on.”
In a brief on-camera interview in the film, the younger Mizrahi, who at the time looked to be in his 20s, says that when Cuban people find out that he is Jewish, they are mostly curious: “They ask ‘What is Judaism? How do you do it? Who are you? And why are you Jews?’”
As the film suggests, these are existential questions that the remaining Jews answer through their actions every day of their lives in Cuba.