Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) on December 23, 2019 reported that Liusdan Martínez Lescaille, a twelve year-old Jewish boy was forbidden by Cuban educational authorities from entering his school while wearing a kippah ( also known as a yarmulke) since December 11, 2019 with the result that he has been prevented from continuing his education. His younger brother, Daniel Moises, has also been subjected to the ban and government authorities threatened to open legal proceedings against his parents, jailing them and taking their children away, for "threatening the children’s normal development."
CSW documented that Liusdan was regularly beaten up at school since the family moved to the Nuevitas municipality in 2016, and that the situation worsened in September 2019.
"According to his parents, Olainis Tejada Beltrán and Yeliney Lescaille Prebal, members of the Sephardic Bnei Anusim community, their son was singled out for ridicule soon after he started classes in September 2019 at the Latin America Urban Basic Secondary School in Nuevitas. Since then he has been subjected to four severe beatings instigated by a classmate who is the son of a military captain, along with other students. Despite multiple complaints by the parents to Martínez Lescaille’s teacher, who is head of the grade and the school director, no action was taken to protect the child.
After Tejada Beltrán publicly denounced the treatment of his son in the independent media, the Cuban educational authorities created a commission to review his son’s situation. However, during this period, he was pressured by school administrators on multiple occasions to retract his complaints. At one point there was an attempt by the school director to expel his son for supposed acts of violence, however, five teachers stepped in to defend Martínez Lescaille and the expulsion did not take place.
On 11 December the commission announced its findings, holding a school guard responsible for failing to stop the attacks on Martínez Lescaille. However, rather than sanctioning the guard, a kippah ban was put in place instead. Tejada Beltrán has called for the ban to be revoked, pointing out that it effectively prohibits his son from entering the school grounds and that there are no other educational alternatives.
The Castro regime has a long history of anti-semitism. Seth J. Frantzman, a Jewish academic based in Jerusalem, following the death of Fidel Castro in November 2016 wrote an analysis of the tyrant's antisemitism.
"Most Jews fled Cuba when Castro came to power, dwindling from 15,000 to around 1,500 by 2014. Once Castro entered the Soviet orbit the official anti-Zionist and anti-Israel line became common in Cuba, but most writers argue it did not flow over into anti-semitism. Only one anti-semitic incident, stone throwing at a synagogue during the 1973 war, was recorded in decades."
Religious repression was widespread in Cuba, beginning in the 1960s, and that also included Judaism. The attack on the synagogue coincided with Fidel Castro breaking diplomatic relations with Israel on September 10, 1973. The lack of reported antisemitic incidents had more to do with the end of independent civil society and the outlawing of human rights groups under the Castro regime. Frantzman exposes the duplicity of Fidel Castro, highlighting how he prevented the importation of kosher meat.
The reality is revealed in an interesting report was revealed regarding an episode in 1994 in which Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau attempted to get Castro to allow kosher meat into Cuba. An Israeli diplomat named Joel Barromi told Haaaretz writer Adi Schwartz in a 2006 interview surprising details. The Cuban leader had initially rejected Lau’s request to bring in kosher meat. “I told you that I am fighting against the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in my country…do you want to make my people anti-Semitic,” Castro asked. “We have the practice of allocating 150 grams of bread a day, but the Jews in Cuba would have meat? [The people] will have a horrible hatred for them, envy them tremendously and loot their homes if under such conditions you see to import kosher meat for the Jews, you yourself create the anti-Semitism that I have been stopping.”
This is the example of supposedly stopping anti-semitism, to threaten Jews that if they should want to eat kosher meat that they would “create” anti-semitism. Castro was at first admitting that he had starved his country by putting it on bread rations, but surely Cubans eat some meat. So why would some meat for Jewish people “make” them anti-Semitic? One wonders whether “envy” for Muslims eating Halal would create the same excuse for Islamophobia just because Muslims celebrate Eid by eating a sheep? According to articles the same Cuba that feared meat would force people to be anti-semitic, was welcoming to Halal food.
The Castro regime aided, trained, and armed terrorist groups that targeted Israel for destruction. Cuban troops were sent by Castro to the Middle East to fight against Israel, with the Yom Kippur war being a high profile example. Focus on Cuba, an information service of the Cuba Transition Project of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami in their Issue 57 published staff report on July 29, 2004 titled "Castro and Terrorism: A Chronology" that summarized this hostility to Israel.
Cuban military and intelligence personnel aided Middle Eastern groups and regimes in their struggle against Israel, and Cuban troops fought on the side of Arab States, particularly Syria, during the Yom Kippur war. Castro sent military instructors and advisors into Palestinian bases; cooperated with Libya in the founding of World Mathaba, a terrorist movement; and established close military cooperation and exchanges with Iraq, Libya, Southern Yemen, the Polisario Front for the Liberation of Western Sahara, the PLO and others in the Middle East.
In the August 1988 issue of The Atlantic in the article "Cuba: Havana's Military Machine" by John Hoyt Williams provided more detail on Cuban involvement in the Yom Kippur War against Israel.
In 1973, probably at Moscow's behest, Castro dispatched 500 Cuban tank commanders to Syria. These men performed well and died well in the Yom Kippur War with Israel. Not long after their debut in Syria, Cuban military personnel were training, arming, and advising Polisario guerrillas who were fighting for the independence of the Western Sahara.
Myles Kantor's November 12, 2003 article in National Review, "Who’s Afraid of 'Uncle Fidel'?" exposed the underreporting of anti-semitism by the Anti-Defamation League with regards to Cuba and detailed some of the Castro regime's anti-Israel and anti-Jewish history.
“I am assaulted by the anti-Israel propaganda,” Cuban Jew Ricardo Behar remarks. “It is a constant nightmare over our minds.” Cuban Jew Tony Fune refers to the regime’s “persistent Judeophobia” that manifests itself in the media’s “endless hours of hatred against Israel.”Foxman writes of the U.N.’s 1975 resolution that equated Zionism with racism:Thankfully, the “Zionism is racism” resolution was revoked in 1991 by a U.N. vote of 87 to 25–although this vote of course indicates that, as of 1991, at least twenty-five states were still willing to openly maintain the position that Zionism is a form of racism, thereby seeking to delegitimize Israel and threaten the Jewish right of self-determination.Cuba cosponsored the resolution and was one of the 25 countries that opposed its revocation.
Scholar Irving Louis Horowitz in his 2007 paper, “Cuba, Castro and Anti-Semitism” observed that “the remnants of the Jewish community in Havana, not-withstanding, Cuba is one more nation where anti-Semitism without Jews is a core belief.”
This is underscored by the actions of the dictatorship in Cuba over the past six decades.
Castro regime officials in 2019 barred Jewish children from wearing the kippah to school, decades earlier barred the importation of kosher meat into Cuba, while importing Halal food, broke relations with Israel in 1973, sent Cuban troops to Syria to fight against Israel during the Yom Kippur War, and backed the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. This accumulation of facts should lead reasonable people to question: Is the Castro regime anti-semitic?
Below is the December 2019 article from Christian Solidarity Worldwide on the latest example of antisemitism in Cuba.
Christian Solidarity Worldwide, December 23, 2019
Jewish child beaten and prohibited from wearing kippah to school
23 Dec 2019
A twelve year-old boy has been forbidden by Cuban educational authorities from entering his school while wearing the Jewish kippah since 11 December, with the result that he has been prevented from continuing his education. His younger brother has also been prevented from entering school and the authorities have threatened to open legal proceedings against his parents.
The kippah ban was imposed by Nuevitas Municipal Director of Education, Osdeini Hernández Navarro. It was issued after a government commission found a school guard guilty of failing to protect the boy, Liusdan Martínez Lescaille, who has been beaten by fellow students on a regular basis since the family moved to Nuevitas in 2016. On Friday 20 December US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Cuba has been added to the State Department’s Special Watch List (SWL) for governments that ‘have engaged in or tolerated severe violations of religious freedom.’
According to his parents, Olainis Tejada Beltrán and Yeliney Lescaille Prebal, members of the Sephardic Bnei Anusim community, their son was singled out for ridicule soon after he started classes in September 2019 at the Latin America Urban Basic Secondary School in Nuevitas. Since then he has been subjected to four severe beatings instigated by a classmate who is the son of a military captain, along with other students. Despite multiple complaints by the parents to Martínez Lescaille’s teacher, who is head of the grade and the school director, no action was taken to protect the child.
After Tejada Beltrán publicly denounced the treatment of his son in the independent media, the Cuban educational authorities created a commission to review his son’s situation. However, during this period, he was pressured by school administrators on multiple occasions to retract his complaints. At one point there was at attempt by the school director to expel his son for supposed acts of violence, however, five teachers stepped in to defend Martínez Lescaille and the expulsion did not take place.
On 11 December the commission announced its findings, holding a school guard responsible for failing to stop the attacks on Martínez Lescaille. However, rather than sanctioning the guard, a kippah ban was put in place instead. Tejada Beltrán has called for the ban to be revoked, pointing out that it effectively prohibits his son from entering the school grounds and that there are no other educational alternatives.
On 17 December both Liusdan and his younger brother, Daniel Moises, were prevented from entering school by Hernández Navarro because they continue to wear the kippah. On the afternoon of 18 December municipal prosecutor Ismaray Vidal Marques issued a summons to Tejada Beltrán and Lescaille Prebal to appear at the prosecutor’s office at 10am the following day.
After complying with the summons the couple were threatened by the authorities who warned that their children would be taken away and the couple imprisoned for ‘threatening the children’s normal development.’
The bullying of children at school because of their religious beliefs or those of their parents is relatively common in Cuba. In 2019 CSW has received a number of cases involving the children of Christian pastors being denied educational opportunities or singled out because their parents hold ‘counter-revolutionary ideas.’ Pastor Ramon Rigal and his wife Ayda Expósito are currently serving prison sentences in eastern Cuba because of their decision to homeschool their children after they were the victims of organised bullying including physical assaults at a government run school.
CSW’s Head of Advocacy Anna-Lee Stangl said: “It is unconscionable that a child would be subjected to serious physical assault with no action taken by school officials whose duty it is to protect all children in their care, regardless of their religious beliefs. The fact that the educational authorities in Nuevitas have chosen to punish two children by closing the school doors to them unless they suppress their religious identity, rather than to hold to account those responsible for the attacks on him is illustrative of a more general hostility to religion within the Cuban school system. We welcome the US State Department’s decision to put Cuba on the Special Watchlist for severe violations of religious freedom and call on the Cuban government to immediately take action to allow Liusdan, Daniel Moises, and other children like them who hold strong religious beliefs to continue their education without hindrance. We also call for the authorities to cease their harassment of Mr Tejada Beltrán and Mrs Lescaille Prebal and to drop any legal case against them. Religious discrimination within Cuban schools cannot be permitted to continue.”