How Fidel Castro Saved Cuba's Only Kosher Butcher

How Fidel Castro Saved Cuba's Only Kosher Butcher
Yacob Berezniak Hernandez Got Letter From Leader
By Gerald Eskenazi (Haaretz)
Published March 11, 2015.

Just by coincidence, forty-eight hours after President Barack Obama
announced a coming détente with Cuba, I was in Havana. And talking to a
kosher butcher, of all people.

Yes, Havana has a kosher butcher, which sounds like the punch-line of a
joke.

There are, after all, only 1,500 Jews left in all of Cuba, the vast
majority in Havana. That 1,500 figure is the one generally given by
people I met at synagogues in Havana and the outskirts — although
Wikipedia claims there are only 500 "core" Jews in the country. A core
Jew, it explains, has a Jewish mother and father. If so, then Gibraltar
has more core Jews than Cuba.

Still, whatever the number — if that really matters — what is
fascinating is how a kosher butcher managed to remain in a country that
was intent on wiping out private enterprise as well as barely tolerated
organized religion when Fidel Castro took over in 1959.

Yet, the shop has survived, in the same place, all these years. It is
run by a gregarious accountant/shochat [butcher] named Yacob Berezniak
Hernandez (although on his business card he is listed as "Yacob
Berezniak H"). The store is underwritten by Cuba's only Orthodox
synagogue, Adath Israel, which Berezniak leads.

A letter from Castro

"In 1962, Castro wrote a special letter to us, giving us permission to
stay open," explains Berezniak. "I still have that letter." It is
unclear why Castro decided to write that letter. Perhaps it was because
about 90 percent of Cuba's 15,000 Jews left after he came to power and
Castro was making a show of being good to the remaining Jews.

I visited Berezniak as part of the "Shalom Cuba" tour run by LATOUR, a
member of The Isramworld Portfolio of Brands.

In the States, you still need some form of arts or religious or
human-rights reason to visit Cuba, a rule that hasn't yet changed
despite the joint announcement from both countries. So our Latour trip
included Friday night services (followed by a rooftop dinner) at a
synagogue; a visit to the butcher; a three-hour trip to visit a
Holocaust memorial in a Jewish cemetery, and time spent visiting
cultural sites such as Che Guevara's statue and a former rum factory.
And of course we posed in 1957 Chevrolets. According to U.S. travel
rules, visitors must adhere to the scheduled visits — but are free to go
on their own in the evening.

Berezniak has a daunting regimen. There are no cows in downtown Havana.
So once a month he gets up at 2 A.M. to make the 45-mile trip to a
slaughterhouse. There, he personally disposes of about 60 cows in a
ritualistic killing — as he describes it, "taking only the front half of
the animal." That is where the kosher cuts are. That yields, he said,
about 2,000 pounds which he loads into a refrigerated van and brings
back to his shop.

Of course, one man's kosher is another man's treyf. There is no kosher
certification available in Cuba, but he hews as closely as possible to
the elements of kosher slaughter. And then when he has all the meat
brought into his shop, he carves it up — and distributes it, for free,
to each of the three synagogues.

"There are some people who eat three meals a day at our synagogues," he
explains. "Breakfast at the Reform, lunch at the Conservative, dinner at
the Orthodox."

He figures that, on average, he is able to give about 12 ounces of meat
weekly to each person through its distribution from the synagogues.

"The people make a lot of ropa vieja," he said, chuckling. "Ropa vieja"
is Spanish for "old clothes" and is, perhaps, the most popular dish in
Cuba. Its main ingredient is shredded beef, and so it goes a long way.
If you had a Cuban Jewish grandmother, she probably would have made you
ropa vieja on Friday nights — just as my Polish-born grandmother made
flanken.

For Jews only

However, if you're visiting the butcher, you cannot actually buy his
meat. One of the bizarre rules the government has instituted regarding
the business is that the meat is only for Cuba's Jews. It cannot be sold
over the counter. The likely reason is that the government mandates a
fixed amount of pork per person. But it has made exceptions for its
Jewish community, allowing them the privilege of having "kosher" meat
instead.

There are many odd things surrounding the Jewish community in Havana. We
visited a storeroom in another synagogue, Beth Shalom. It was filled
with bottles of vitamins and over-the-counter drugstore items, even
prescription medicines, which tourists are urged to bring. Yet, medicine
is free in Cuba. Still, there appears to be a shortage and so when a Jew
in Cuba has a prescription for medicine, and his pharmacy is out of it,
he goes into the synagogue "pharmacy."

Virtually every Jewish tour of Cuba starts out with visiting a nice
Jewish lady named Adela Dworin of the Beth Shalom synagogue. She speaks
in a conversational style, giving the history of Cuba's Jews, especially
since the revolution. In a sense, she is the quasi-governmental link
among officialdom, Cuban Judaism, and the Jewish tourist.

"Meat is rationed in Cuba," she says, betraying no bitterness. She
appears, quite simply, to accept this as the way of life. "We eat
kosher-style."

During my visit, someone asked her if one could get a bagel in Havana.

She smiled. "They make very good bread in Cuba," she said. "But they
don't know how to make bread with a hole in the middle."

Source: How Fidel Castro Saved Cuba's Only Kosher Butcher – Forward.com
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http://forward.com/articles/216455/how-fidel-castro-saved-cubas-only-kosher-butcher/