The Cubans and Jews fighting against weaponization of trauma
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In 1981, Cuban exile leader Jorge Mas Canosa sat down with officials in the Reagan administration looking for a way to turn Miami’s anti-Castro movement into a force that could shape Washington. According to historical accounts, Reagan national security adviser Richard Allen offered a solution: study the model that had already succeeded, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Mas Canosa followed that advice. The Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), founded later that year, would become one of the most influential ethnic lobbying organizations in the U.S., helping shape Washington’s Cuba policy for decades. By studying AIPAC’s model, CANF sought to adapt a proven strategy: translating the emotional force of exile and historical grievance into sustained political power in Washington.
While CANF is mainly rooted in South Florida’s exile politics, AIPAC is deeply embedded in national politics, spending roughly $127 million on federal races during the 2024 election campaign and targeting Israel critics. Still, CANF maintains significant influence over U.S.-Cuba policy, which remains defined by Cold War frameworks. On the island, conditions have grown increasingly dire: Prolonged blackouts, acute fuel shortages, and widespread scarcity of food and medicine have made daily life precarious for millions, crises exacerbated by U.S. sanctions. Hard-line positions continue to dominate electoral politics in South Florida, even as younger generations and organizers challenge the embargo and its human consequences.
The current reckoning with the Zionist capture of Jewish narratives allows for a timely comparative lens. Both diasporas are navigating inherited political orthodoxies that are being actively contested from within. Understanding how these narratives are constructed—and how they are being dismantled—offers insight into broader movements resisting U.S. imperialism today.
Wrestling with distorted histories
When Jessica Rosenberg started rabbinical school in 2012, there was only one progressive anti-Zionist rabbi in the U.S. “It wasn’t even a question if the school was Zionist. Of course it was,” she said. “Growing up I wasn’t told I was a Zionist. The conflation between being Jewish and Zionist was so seamless that there really were no seams showing. It was one piece of fabric for which Shabbat and Israel were equally part of Jewish life.”
Today, Rosenberg—who organizes an anti-Zionist community in Minneapolis called World to Come—is among a growing Jewish American left tearing at the seams of Zionism. Many are reckoning with and disentangling the distorted narratives they were raised with. Increasing disillusionment with Israel as it commits genocide in Gaza is catalyzing a movement, shepherding alternative political and cultural institutions vying for power in shaping the future of Jewish communal life.
But Jewish Americans—the majority of whom descend from Ashkenazi communities fleeing state violence in Eastern Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries—are not the only diaspora wrestling with weaponized histories.
“The Cuban diaspora trauma that’s valid is being manipulated for political expediency, whether it be from the right that is trying to weaponize anything that’s left of center as authoritarian communism [or] the corporate conservative Democrats, who are taking advantage so they don’t have to actually fight for anything,” said Angel Montalvo, president of the Miami Progressive Caucus. “What I’ve been finding is that it’s like the boy who cried wolf, and like the boy who cried authoritarianism.”
Points of exile
For Cuban Americans, exile memory begins with the Cuban Revolution of 1959, a watershed moment that followed years of armed insurgency against the U.S.-backed regime of Fulgencio Batista. The revolutionary movement, led by Fidel Castro, entered Havana in January 1959 after Batista fled the country, bringing an abrupt end to the existing political order. In the years that followed, the new government rapidly consolidated power and aligned itself increasingly with the Soviet Union amid Cold War tensions.
Those early years also produced one of the largest waves of Cuban migration in history. Beginning in 1959 and accelerating through the 1960s, tens of thousands of Cubans left the island, many initially expecting a temporary exile. As political repression intensified, property was expropriated, and travel restrictions hardened, exile became more permanent and politically charged. Miami, in particular, emerged as the home of this diaspora, transforming rapidly from a regional port city into a political and cultural capital of Cuban exile life.
Over time, these experiences turned the Revolution into a moral dividing line. Cuba became synonymous with authoritarianism and loss, while U.S. policy—especially the embargo—was often justified as punishment and pressure for democratic change. In South Florida, this narrative was reinforced by media institutions that helped translate exile memory into electoral influence and policy advocacy, but it was especially passed down through family.
Amanda Rose, a Jewish Voice for Peace organizer who grew up in Miami, said she absorbed the narratives percolating through both the Cuban and Jewish communities in the city long before she fully understood them.
Both the Cuban American and Jewish American communities are swinging to the right to lock in their place and stability in a place where they were once marginalized.
Amanda Rose, Jewish Voice for Peace organizer
“You have two groups of people who are sort of dizzied by assimilation and by the tenuous position of straddling whiteness,” Rose said. “Both the Cuban American and Jewish American communities are swinging to the right to lock in their place and stability in a place where they were once marginalized.”
The Jewish American diaspora has its own painful modern history of exile. After the Nazi Holocaust, a consensus formed in mainstream institutions that the murder of 6 million European Jews and uprooting of millions more necessitated the colonization of Palestine and formation of a Jewish ethnostate.
During the ensuing decades, Zionist political leaders evoked the specter of an impending “second Holocaust” to coax support for their political project. In his book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” historian Ilane Pappe documents examples of the “second Holocaust” narrative from the 1948 Nakba. Zionist military leaders planning ethnic cleansing operations in Palestinian villages “would come down and actively incite the troops by demonizing the Palestinians and invoking the Holocaust as the point of reference for the operations ahead,” he writes.
In the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli officials took this narrative into overdrive, manufacturing consent for its genocide in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas “the new Nazis,” while former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett declared on live television, “We’re fighting Nazis.”
When then-U.S. President Joe Biden visited Israel after Oct. 7, he remarked, “October 7 … became the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. It has brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by millennia of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jewish people.”
After a protest movement emerged against U.S. support for Israel’s genocide, mainstream Jewish institutions enthusiastically adopted this rhetoric. Anti-Defamation League (ADL) President Jonathan Greenblatt drew an analogy between pro-Palestine protests and Nazi rallies and compared keffiyehs to swastikas.
Jewish genocide historian Raz Segal authored an article responding to Biden’s speech, titled “Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust.” Segal wrote, “Biden’s words constitute therefore a textbook use of the Holocaust not in order to stand with powerless people facing the prospect of genocidal violence, but to support and justify an extremely violent attack by a powerful state and, at the same time, distort this reality.” The potency of Holocaust memory not only persists as a point of persuasion in Jewish communities, but is also directly invoked for political leverage by U.S. officials enabling impunity toward the state of Israel, which continues to receive two-thirds of its weapons from the U.S.
Lexi Sasanow, a campaign organizer with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) in New York City, said that many JFREJ members “were raised to worship the state of Israel, and they had to worship Israel because of the Holocaust.” The narrative goes, Sasanow said, “Once, we had no power, so now we must have all the power.”
The “strongman” and the militarized state
The idea that staunch support for Zionism was a necessary, if regrettable, byproduct of the Holocaust pervades Jewish American politics. “For so many members of the Jewish community and for so many of these institutions, fear is the currency by which they maintain power,” said Sophie Ellman-Golan, JFREJ strategic communications director. “Jews are told that we’ll never actually dismantle antisemitism, so the best we can hope for is a backup country with an incredibly powerful military that can crush anyone. And we need that so that we can flee when inevitably everybody here turns on us.”
The logical corollary to treating antisemitism as an immutable, eternal force, for many, is that the only means of true safety is a hypermilitarized fortress. In other words, Israel.
While fear is a potent fuel for propaganda, JFREJ—which combats antisemitism through a collective liberation framework—is experiencing a surge in membership due to its slow work of disentangling deceitful narratives, according to Ellman-Golan. In 2025, JFREJ’s membership grew by 25%.
“When you’re caught up in that fear factory, you’re told that everyone hates you, that you’ll never be truly safe. Our generation of Jews have become very aware of this fear factory,” Ellman-Golan said.
Meanwhile, Cuban American political identity in South Florida has been shaped for generations by a singular figure: Fidel Castro. Cuban American organizers and activists argue that this fixation on the Cuban strongman has obscured other forms of authoritarianism—including those emerging within the U.S. itself.
Danny Valdez, founder of Cuban Americans for Cuba, described growing up in Miami immersed in narratives that portrayed Cuba as a place remembered with nostalgia and condemned as a political nightmare. Castro was the central villain.
“It’s an entire mechanism of policing language around how you talk about Cuba that pretty much emanates out of Miami,” he said.
Montalvo, who was raised in a Cuban American household where socialism was synonymous with repression, said that anti-communism initially structured his understanding of politics. Over time, however, he began questioning why authoritarianism was treated as a uniquely Cuban phenomenon, while increasingly punitive policies in the U.S. escaped similar scrutiny.
This contradiction became especially apparent, he argued, during the rise of Donald Trump. A 2024 Florida International University poll found that 68% of likely Cuban American voters in Miami-Dade County planned to vote for Trump, despite his aggressive immigration enforcement policies. The unifying policy was a hard-line stance on Cuba and a strictly anti-communist positioning.
The dynamic reflects a deeper tradition in Latin American political culture known as caudillismo, the concentration of power and public loyalty around a strongman figure who claims to embody the nation. In Miami, Castro’s image continues to organize political discourse long after his death as the central caudillo. The figure of the authoritarian ruler remains a central reference point through which contemporary conflicts are interpreted. What has changed, organizers argue, is that figure now appears in Washington, D.C.
Complicit institutions
The anti-communist political consensus in South Florida was cultivated through media outlets and advocacy organizations that helped define the boundaries of acceptable discourse about Cuba.
Among the most influential was Radio Martí, the U.S. government-funded broadcaster launched in 1985 during the Reagan administration. Conceived as a tool to challenge the Cuban government, Radio Martí framed Cuba through the language of communist failure. Its rise coincided with the growing influence of CANF.
Valdez recalled that many of the assumptions he encountered as a child felt like ideas absorbed through “cultural osmosis.” Opposition to Castro became opposition to social democracy, labor organizing, universal healthcare proposals, and other policies frequently labeled as socialist. In this way, anti-communism functioned as a governing political language in South Florida.
Meanwhile, the default Zionist politics adopted by many in the Jewish American diaspora is the product of decades of advocacy work from organizations such as the ADL. Once regarded as the leading voice in the diaspora, the ADL’s decision to ingratiate itself with the Trump administration, and its unequivocal support for Israel, has alienated the organization from a growing segment of the Jewish left.
“We’ve seen absolute bootlicking from the ADL, whether it’s whitewashinging Elon Musk or the constant attacks on Black and Muslim women,” Ellman-Golan said. “As more and more voices reject the ADL’s conception of what it means to be Jewish, they face a choice. They can expand their tent poles to more wholly represent the full spectrum of where American Jews are, or they can shut the flaps and say, ‘Only the people who fall within these lines count as real Jews.’ And that’s what they’ve chosen to do.”
Many religious Jewish institutions also reinforce the conflation between Judaism and Zionism. Religious affinity for “Eretz Yisrael”—the land of Israel—is an over 2,000-year-old concept that far predates Jewish nationalism. But Rosenberg, the rabbi who organizes in Minneapolis, said that many Jewish educational institutions treat the biblical concept of Israel as synonymous with the modern nation-state of Israel.
“Jews in the pews whose fears about antisemitism are real and cultural connection to the place and concept of Israel are real, but [they] have been manipulated to support a militarized nation-state with a very specific political agenda,” she said. “This narrative is really a form of power and control for rich white men for whom Israel is a testing ground for military and surveillance technologies.”
She added, “The fact that all the mainstream Jewish institutions are extremely Zionist is obviously a huge problem. They empower incredible violence.”
While the primary victims of Zionism are Palestinians, weaponizing Holocaust narratives to bolster the paradox of safety through supremacy also impacts the Jewish diaspora. For one, when a country commiting a genocide clad in uniforms bearing the Star of David repeatedly claims that it acts at the behest of all Jews—parroted by its supporters in the U.S.—this conflation muddles the line of complicity.
“Supremacy makes us less safe,” Sasanow said. “Whether it’s the idea that we are the most vulnerable or we are the chosen ones, when there’s separation of Jews from our neighbors … we are all less safe.”
Organizing and solutions
For Mike Rivero, an organizer with progressive advocacy group Cubanos Pa’Lante, the political use of exile trauma has become one of the defining features of South Florida politics. Rivero grew up hearing stories about Cuba from parents who arrived in the U.S. as children after the revolution. His family described a life disrupted by political upheaval and forced migration.
“That family trauma, that communal trauma that’s part of the Cuban American experience is a very real and raw emotion that has been weaponized from multiple directions,” Rivero said. “One of the things I’m most proud of in terms of my involvement with Cubanos Pa’Lante is that we aim to create that space where we can push back on that weaponization.”
For decades, South Florida politicians have used fears of socialism and communism to shape elections. The tactic has proven remarkably effective, often persuading voters to support candidates whose domestic policies may conflict with their own economic interests. Rivero said he frequently encounters voters who express support for expanding healthcare access or protecting Social Security benefits, only to support politicians who oppose those measures. The contradiction is visible in places like Hialeah, Florida, where residents have enrolled in Affordable Care Act coverage at some of the highest rates in the country while continuing to vote overwhelmingly for Republican candidates who campaign against the law.
“The right-wing has been using this situation to hold on to power,” Rivero said.
At the same time, Rivero rejects efforts from some sectors of the left to romanticize the Cuban government.
“You can’t ignore political repression,” he said, referring to the mass arrests that occurred on July 11, 2021. “You also have to hold the Cuban government accountable. So we really aim to fill that space and have that conversation.”
His organization advocates ending the U.S. embargo while simultaneously criticizing the Cuban government’s restrictions on political freedoms.
“The embargo has not worked,” Rivero said. “Sixty-plus years later, all it’s ultimately doing is robbing the Cuban people of opportunities to find relief.”
Younger Cuban Americans have generally expressed greater openness toward engagement with Cuba than previous generations.
For Montalvo, of the Miami Progressive Caucus, that shift began when his views began to change during the rise of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns, when he found himself agreeing with policies that were routinely labeled socialist despite years of hearing socialism portrayed as inherently authoritarian.
“I had to investigate all these beliefs that I had, and these preconceived notions about what Cuba was, why people talk about Cuba in the way that they do,” he said.
In February 2025, Montalvo traveled to Cuba for the first time as part of a solidarity brigade that delivered agricultural equipment to sustainable farming projects. The trip, he said, reinforced his belief that discussions about Cuba in South Florida often ignore the material consequences of U.S. sanctions.
I focus on sanctions and the blockade is because, as an American, that’s what I have control over. I’m not really interested in being an apologist for the Cuban government.
Angel Montalvo, Miami Progressive Caucus president
“The reason that I focus on sanctions and the blockade is because, as an American, that’s what I have control over,” said Montalvo. “I’m not really interested in being an apologist for the Cuban government either.”
Montalvo argued that anti-communist politics have become so embedded in South Florida that they often function as a catchall explanation for a wide range of political debates. He sees similarities between the pressures faced by anti-Zionist Jewish organizers and Cuban-Americans who oppose the embargo. Yet Montalvo believes younger organizers are increasingly willing to challenge those boundaries.
Ellman-Golan said that Jewish communities are seeking an alternative to the Zionist conception of Judaism. JFREJ and its vision of “radical diasporism” is one such alternative.
“It’s really important to create Jewish communal spaces and be loud Jewish voices that make very clear you don’t have to choose between being part of Jewish community and opposing genocide and also fighting for justice where you live,” Ellman-Golan said. “Radical diasporism is the exact opposite. It is a rejection of the idea that we must either assimilate or flee to Israel. It’s the idea that we can be here as we are, fully Jewish with our culture, our traditions, all our idiosyncrasies.”
Under the umbrella of radical diasporism, JFREJ organizes local campaigns including combating antisemitism through a framework of collective liberation, canvassing for progressive politicians including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, organizing against police violence, and supporting divestment from Israel bonds.
Part of the vision includes dismantling mainstream Jewish institutions entangled in reactionary pro-Israel politics, such as the ADL. An expanding ecosystem of organizations, including JFREJ, coalesced to form a “Drop the ADL” campaign, challenging its credibility as a voice for Jewish Americans.
On the cultural and religious front, JFREJ and World to Come are two of the 53 Jewish organizations that formed the Jewish Diaspora Network in May. According to its website, “We aspire to be a hub for Jewish cultural and religious projects that reject the assumption that Jews need an insular culture or a militarized ethnostate.”
“People voted with their feet, with their bodies and hearts and minds and time. People created enough places where this is real that it now makes sense to come together,” Rosenberg said.
A Passover prayer for Cuba
Every spring, Jewish people around the world congregate with friends and families for Passover, chronicling the story of liberation from slavery and exodus from oppression. Khaverte Malke, an organizer with the Washington, D.C., metro area chapter of the Jewish Labor Bund, was planning her Seder when her mind wandered to Cuba. (Malke is using a pseudonym to protect her privacy.)
“Part of the Seder is praying for Jews around the world who don’t have enough,” she said. “I had read articles about Cuba being blockaded, and I was just like, ‘I bet there’s a Jewish population there.’”
She did some research into the Jewish Cuban diaspora and found eight active congregations, ranging from Orthodox to Reform, Sepharic, and Ashkenazi. “Eventually, I was just like, ‘I should reach out and send a letter,’” she said.
Five local chapters of the Jewish Labor Bund—a recently revived socialist political organization dating back to the early 1900s—emailed a letter expressing solidarity with Cuban Jews and asking how the Bund could support them. While there was no immediate response, the group is now attempting to deliver a physical letter to Cuba.
“With this Cuba letter, I’m really trying to help build that other narrative that we aren’t a monolith,” Malke said.
Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor