Santa Clara is the capital city of the Cuban province of Villa Clara, and is located near the center of the country, a location that has helped ensure its growth. Santa Clara was founded by 175 people on July 15th, 1689. In 2004, the municipality had a population of about 235,000.  Santa Clara is central to modern Cuban history because it was the site of the last battle in the Cuban Revolution.  In late 1958, two leaders of the revolution, Ernesto Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, defeated the forces of Batista and soon thereafter Batista fled Cuba.  At the entrance of Santa Clara is a mausoleum that contains the remains of Che Guevara and sixteen of his fellow combatants who were killed in 1967 in Bolivia.

David Tacher Romano heads the small Santa Clara Jewish community of about40 people. David is a passionate activist and philosopher-leader who works to, not only help the Santa Clara Jewish community, but teach other Cubans about the history of the Jews and the reasons why Israel exists. David has helped recreate the Santa Clara Jewish community, much having been lost after the Revolution, with the synagogue and cemetery turned over to the government because of the dramatic decline of the Jewish population. 

Much has changed in the last decade. For a community facing many challenges, without a synagogue or torah, little knowledge of Judaism or Hebrew, and a Jewish cemetery abandoned and lying in ruin, David is helping to build a vibrant community with a synagogue and a torah (donated by the Cuban Jewish Relief Project).  Under David’s leadership, by 2000 the cemetery had been fixed and David turned to another challenge: building a Holocaust memorial. 

David felt that it was important to preserve in this small Cuban community the memory of the six million Jews who perished.  With his leadership, a memorial was created with assistance from the American Jewish community and the U.S. Holocaust Museum donating stones from the Warsaw Ghetto. Visitors to the memorial, which is situated in a corner of the cemetery, pour water on a pine tree David planted with sand from the Negev and water from the Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River that he brought back from a visit to Israel.