“If the purpose of her words was to offend us, she succeeded. But she also strengthened our dignity.”
14ymedio, Havana, 11 May 2025 — A vehement statement from the Jewish Community in Cuba, published this Saturday, reacts to Mariela Castro’s statements on State TV’s Mesa Redonda [Round Table] program, which they attribute to her “excessive hatred” and “deep contempt” toward Jews. The congresswoman and daughter of Raúl Castro said on Friday, in an interview with spokesperson Randy Alonso, that “there is no Jewish people,” but rather people who profess that religion “victimized in an exaggerated manner using biblical myths.”
Cuban Jews accuse Castro of having expressed herself in an “insulting” manner and of having gone “too far” in her statement, taking advantage of the “impunity” granted to her by her rank and family. Her words “incite hatred within the Cuban population.” In just a few hours, the message has accumulated hundreds of comments supporting Jews and condemning the sexologist’s statements.
While the regime has always held an anti-Israel stance and dismissed its defense after the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023—in which some 1,200 Israelis died and 251 were kidnapped—no senior Cuban official had ever spoken out in such an “incoherent, hurtful, irresponsible, and disrespectful manner, in a clear act of abuse of power” as did Mariela Castro.
“There are many ways to defend a cause, and we see this demonstrated every day around the world. However, wanting peace for the Palestinian people does not give us any right to discredit, curse, or attack the people of Israel,” they argue.
They urge Castro—using the Jewish dialectic of “one question with another”—to answer “why they have been persecuted for centuries by different nations” since their expulsion from Israel in the first century by the Roman Empire. They also remind the deputy that Fidel Castro himself admitted in 2011 that “no one has been slandered more than the Jews… the Jews have led a much more difficult life than ours. There is nothing that can compare to the Holocaust.”
The Jewish Community also criticized Mariela Castro for equating Zionism with fascism—”in its Nazi expression”—when they are historically antagonistic movements. By 1945, the Nazis had eliminated 2.7 million Jews in extermination camps, some two million in mass shootings, and almost one million in concentration camps or ghettos in European cities—figures Castro ignores.
They also explain that in the State of Israel today, “multiple ethnic and religious minorities coexist, including a 20% Arab-Israeli population.” They also denounce misconceptions and ahistorical misidentifications by Raúl Castro’s daughter, for whom the fascism of the 1920s is, in her own words, identifiable with the Zionist movement of the late 19th century, which promoted the return of Jews scattered throughout the world to their land of origin.
The document also criticizes the Round Table program for attempting to gloss over, in “barely an hour” and tangentially, both Israel’s conflict with Palestine and its attempts to achieve “a peace that has so far been rejected by several Arab leaders.” This, they conclude, is an “opinion from ignorance” or, rather, a denial of Jewish cultural heritage and memory.
“The Jewish Community of Cuba reiterates its commitment to respectful dialogue, peace among peoples, and the defense of our history, culture, and dignity,” they conclude. “If the objective of her words was to offend us, she has succeeded. But she has also strengthened our dignity.”
“The Jewish Community of Cuba reiterates its commitment to respectful dialogue, peace among peoples, and the defense of our history”
Castro had appeared on the Round Table to address issues related to the pro-government LGBTI community, which she leads as director of the National Center for Sexual Education (Cenesex). On the program, the deputy alleged that Israel was seeking a “full and total ethnic cleansing” of Palestine, in collusion with the United States.
Alonso compared this supposed intention to that of Nazi Germany with “the Jewish people,” to which Castro replied by denying that such a people existed. “There is a Jewish religion.” “The poor [people of Israel],” he mocked. “Of course, at that time, imperialism, led by the United Kingdom and later by the United States, in order not to lose the geopolitical power of the Bosphorus Strait and the Red Sea, did not want to lose their colonial power.”
“They’re not Hebrews, they’re of the Jewish religion, they’re not Semites.” Alonso approved the comment and tried to clarify: “The Jewish people are not the same as Zionist power,” he said, but Castro returned the attack: “Zionist power was an entire political supremacist movement that was born shortly before Nazism, and they were very closely related, and are very closely related, to all the worst of Nazism and fascism, which is now resurfacing with great force.”
Continuing, he stated that the regime’s “revolutionary activism” had a duty to react against Israel and its allies. In addition to condemning Castro’s remarks, the Jewish Community in Cuba promised that, if they were ratified on other platforms by herself or other regime officials, they would receive a “firm, dignified, and also unpunished” response from Cuban Jews.
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