“Stories of joy, resilience, hard work, deep love for culture, country and family.” The third annual CineFest Latino Boston kicks off this week and that’s how founder and executive director Sabrina Avilés describes this year’s lineup of films.
Among them is a short film that shines a light on a little-known chapter of Jewish life in Cuba. “The Last Jews of Guantanamo,” directed by Yael Bridge, shares the story of two older women as they prepare for their long-delayed bat mitzvah.
But it goes beyond their personal journeys; it also shares the vibrant legacy of a Jewish community that has endured decades of restrictions on religious practice. Filmmaker Yael Bridge joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share more about her short film. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: It’s great to talk with you about this. I’m super interested because I’ve actually been to Guantanamo about 10 times, and I’ve also made a documentary related to Guantanamo, but I’ve never been in the Cuban part. It’s all the military prison.
So, to start off, for Americans who might only know the name Guantanamo from the military prison, tell us about Cuban Guantanamo and this Jewish community there.
Yael Bridge: Yeah, it turns out that before the military base was there, there was a town called Guantanamo, adjacent to it is the Bay, where the U.S. set up shop and took over the military base there. But there is this community, a town that lives there.
When I was in Cuba about a decade ago, I had heard that there were some Jews who lived in this community, and my ears perked up because, like you, I was familiar with the military base and all the atrocities that were going on over there. I was curious to go and explore this other area.
Rath: How did you find out about the Jewish community there, and what spurred you to document it?
Bridge: I went to Cuba about a decade ago with my family, and it was right when travel restrictions were being lifted, so we went to learn about the history of Jews living in Cuba.
We were mostly in Havana for that trip, but I learned that there were some other pockets of Jews living around the country in Guantanamo and Santiago de Cuba. As soon as I heard the name Guantanamo, my ears just perked up, because I didn’t even know there was a town. I just knew about the military base.
I came back on a separate trip to go and explore the town and the community of Jews that were living there.
Rath: I’ve done stories — it was a lovely story, actually — about older Jewish women getting bat mitzvahed because it wasn’t available to them when they were actually coming of age. But for these two women that you’re covering, I’m assuming that the delay had something to do with being in Cuba.
Bridge: Yeah, there were different restrictions on what types of religious practice one was able to practice at different stages in the last several decades in Cuba.
Largely, how it affected this community in Guantanamo was about public practice, so you could have your own religious practice in your house, but you didn’t really talk about it, and you weren’t publicly performing anything. Because of that, you know, they still celebrated some holidays privately. They never felt like they couldn’t be Jewish or that this was a secret they had to keep, but they weren’t having large gatherings for celebrations, like a bar mitzvah.
Slowly, it was becoming more common for people to have bar and bat mitzvahs in Cuba, so they were really excited when the leader of their community asked them if they might want to have one, which had never ever occurred to them since they were, at this point, already in their 80s. But they were so thrilled and honored to be able to have that opportunity.
Rath: Tell us more about that — how it was thrilling for them. What did that mean for them to do this at this stage?
Bridge: I think it was really like a bonding experience for the two of them, and also within their community. You know, they gathered in the synagogue that they had, and they practiced, but only one person at that point had a bar mitzvah in their community — which, we’re talking like tens of people, I think, around 40 or 45 when I was filming.
It was a dwindling community, and a lot of their children had left. So, it was an older community [where] people were leaving to either move to the big city of Havana or try to move to the United States or to Israel. To have a mitzvah for these older women was really like a connection to their community, a connection to their family, and an invigorating part of their identity to publicly embrace and perform that.
Rath: In telling the stories of these two women, there’s a lot of history to tell, along with a personal story. I’m curious, as a filmmaker, how do you go about telling a story that needs so much context?
Bridge: You know, as a storyteller — and I’m sure you know — it’s all about finding the boundaries of: where does the story begin, where does it end, and also, what is the story you can tell, and what is someone else’s story to tell.
I’m not Cuban. I have pretty rudimentary Spanish. But I am Jewish, and that is a big part of my identity, and so I was really interested in that aspect of this community and what it means to be … The relationship between in-group and out-group, and how that is different across cultures. But, we had this connection of being Jewish, so actually, even though my Spanish was pretty poor, my Hebrew is quite good — so, actually, I was able to communicate quite well with some of their family who came from Israel for the bat mitzvah.
That was really the focus and the lens that I was interested in, because I’m not a historian, and I’m not Cuban, so those aren’t really things that I felt were my … You know, I would have my own lens to touch on those, which didn’t feel like the film that I would be making.
Rath: I’m so curious, Yael, hearing you say that. Did making this film have any effect on how you think about your own Jewish identity?
Bridge: Oh yeah, definitely. I think a fun part about being Jewish is to constantly be questioning your identity, and so that was definitely part of what drew me over there.
Also, the Jewish community is so diverse, and so being able to explore that and feel that connection and kinship around ritual — I had a bat mitzvah, and also it was Hanukkah when I was over there — so being able to light candles and celebrate these ancient rituals with people, even though we don’t speak the same language and we have all these other cultural and political differences, was really inspiring, just thinking about the way people connect.
