“To be Cuban and Jewish is to be twice survivors,” says a Havana-based historian, commenting on the small Jewish community in Castro’s Cuba.

I have lived among and traveled to isolated outposts of the diaspora, and am familiar with the journalist’s metrics: a Jewish community gets counted when there is at least one synagogue, a minyan, and a kosher butcher. Real estate, prayer, and food. A community is considered moribund when these disappear.

Dwindling in numbers since the 1959 revolution, the Jews of Cuba were nursed back to observance after the fall of the Soviet Union by an international community which sent kosher food at Passover.

Yet another reminder that food is a powerful marker for identity, nourishing selves — perhaps even souls — as much as bodies.