Cuba beyond the Beach Read online

  Most Cubans are paid in MN, national money or pesos. The average wage in Cuba is roughly 450–500 pesos per month, the equivalent of about $20 CUC, itself pegged to the US dollar. Some types of jobs, especially professional ones, add a further monthly bonus of $20 to $30 CUC. Pensioners generally receive around 350 pesos per month. Cuba’s various social protections in the form of health care, education, and other state subsidies mean that wages mean something different; the market doesn’t determine everything. That’s why Cuba continues to do so well on international measures such as the United Nations Millennium Development Goals or the Human Poverty Index (in which Cuba always ranks among the top developing countries). Yet paradoxically, recent studies have concluded that almost 50 percent of the Cuban population cannot meet its basic food needs. It is not coincidental that an estimated 50 to 60 percent of the population receives remittances from relatives or friends abroad, on average $100 monthly to help with daily expenses. Some 80 percent of remittance recipients are white, which is one obvious reason for the racial visibility of economic inequality in today’s Cuba. The culprit, unlike in most parts of the world, is not insufficient employment. It is insufficient wages — which is all to explain why shopping really matters.1

  The supermarkets are roughly the size of a 7-Eleven or Mac’s Milk in a big North American city. They smell bad and carry canned things. Some items are useful but others leave one scratching one’s head: How many people would pay almost a week’s salary for olives? Canned tuna, which is in demand (and both cheaper and more useful than olives), comes and goes like lightning. The supermarkets also stock frozen goods, almost none of which are useful except for the occasional chicken pieces (usually from the US) and ground turkey. Once when I was in Cuba for a long stay, I noticed that The Shopping near my house all of a sudden featured a random assortment of frozen prepared foods, such as spring rolls. I think I might have been the only one who bought them (they were horrible). The Shopping is where you find oil, crackers, cheese (one variety only), sliced meats, toilet paper, and soap. At least one-third of the store is taken up with rum, cola, and juice. One of the things I love about The Shopping is how the clerks display the single brands of olives or vinegar in rows of artful abundance, mimicking the form, if not the content, of fancy capitalist shopping. Some stores keep tins of things as common and plentiful as tomato sauce or vinegar under glass.

  The market, or the agro (agromercado), is where you buy fruits, vegetables, and, if you have an iron will and half decent Spanish, pork. The pork comes in huge slabs that you have to negotiate down when you are a foreigner, not so much in price but in size. (Unless you want to buy a quarter of a pig at a time, which customers are encouraged to do.) When you are a foreigner, the market is also where you find people to sell you illegal things, chiefly seafood and potatoes. These products are difficult to find in the consumer market but plentiful on tables of hotels and restaurants. The young, gay, seafood vendor at my local agro greets my return to Vedado almost as enthusiastically as do my friends — though I’ve only ever bought one package of shrimp from him. Underground vending is tough business. Of all the tragic-comic aspects of the Cuban shopping experience, men whispering “papas” (potatoes) to you as though they were selling marijuana or porn ranks high. In the agro, you use Cuban pesos; and the most delectable pineapple or mango will set you back less than fifty cents US.

  This division between The Shopping and The Market sets the agenda for one’s day. There is no such thing as a quick shopping trip. But these categorizations overlook altogether a third shopping option, not available to foreigners, which makes the Cuban shopping day even trickier. Cubans purchase their heavily subsidised food rations in state stores: bodegas for most items, panaderías (bakeries) for breads. It’s a confusing system for foreigners to grasp for many reasons. Bodegas and panaderías look more like run-down government offices than grocery stores. Clerks staff the counters in front and retrieve goods for the customers. To make it more confusing, state bakeries include a vente libre or free sale section where non-subsidized goods are available for purchase in moneda nacional. There are also bakeries that sell a wider range of baked goods in CUC that aren’t part of the libreta system. In the past, these rations included personal hygiene and cleaning products, rum, and even cigarettes. Everyone is issued a little book, the libreta, to keep track of their allotment. The Libreta de Abastecimientos, as they formally call the allotment system, was always intended as a vital supplement to the parallel market. Susan Belyea, who is writing a dissertation on how Cubans feed themselves, has been interviewing older habaneros who reminisce with great pleasure about what the libreta once provided: plenty of meat, beer, cigarettes, rum, and even cleaning supplies; a new broom every year. But the system has diminished so drastically in recent years that for a while there was talk of cutting it all together. The libreta allotment is now composed of tiny amounts of oil, rice, coffee, beans, eggs, meat, sugar, salt, and bread (with luxuries like milk, yogurt, and ground meat available for the young, the infirm, and the elderly). The libreta also provides one bun per day, and five eggs and a small amount of chicken or fish monthly. Years ago, as I was getting my bearings on just how Cubans acquire their daily bread, I asked a friend: Is the libreta enough to live on? He responded, confused at my ignorance, “You mean, for a week?” (It’s a monthly ration.) Ten years later, as the state-subsidized portions shrink even further, and the coffee (for example) is replaced by a much-hated mix of coffee and dried peas, the same question would probably just provoke derision. In fact, it’s now estimated that the state-subsidized libreta system accounts for only around 30 percent of Cubans’ caloric intake. Yet the country continues to score well on global health and hunger indices, leading to one obvious conclusion: There is more than one economy.2

  All economies have their divisions between the formal and the informal, and the Cubans hardly invented the black market. But the inconsistencies, bureaucracies, and incongruities of the Cuban system of food distribution, plus the US economic blockade, combine to produce a shopping chaos that simply boggles the mind. Items disappear and reappear with no warning or obvious pattern, and sometimes they reappear in the strangest places. One year when I was there with students, domestic beer had disappeared from virtually all the stores, but a clever student noticed a stash at a kiosk outside the hospital next to our hotel. A few years ago, coffee disappeared from The Shopping and reappeared at fancy cigar stores located in hotels. You can almost always count on getting yogurt at the liquor store in the Hotel Melia Cohiba, even when it has disappeared from The Shopping across the street. In 2011, a Chilean executive of the Rio Zaza juice processing company (Salvador Allende’s former bodyguard, who had been given asylum in Cuba after the coup) was charged with various serious corruption offences. The company closed its doors. Rio Zaza held a near monopoly, so for a while there was no juice in the stores.3

  These problems must be confronted and resolved daily, because they are endless. “A diario, los revolucionarios” is a popular and oft-repeated line from Havana’s beloved rapper Telmary, an ironic and humorous tribute to the daily “revolutionary” acts of simple survival in Cuba.4 The intricate reciprocities of sociolismo provide one solution. Friends and neighbours tell each other when items appear, or strangers ask each other on the street where they got their eggs, to take two common examples. Someone buys a large quantity of cheese and divides it among friends or neighbours, making a few centavos as they slice. Women separate the good grains of their rice quota from the broken, discoloured ones, and sell or trade the inferior bits to neighbours to use in desserts. Omar, an old friend who lives on a disability pension, supplements his income collecting the libreta quota for various neighbours, for which they pay him a tiny amount. At my Spanish teacher’s house, our classes were constantly interrupted by vendors selling huge containers of products. Yogurt and chlorine were both popular. My teacher had formerly run a small restaurant and was still on the list of potential customers for the underground sales
world.

  The problems of food distribution create openings, both large and small, for entrepreneurship. As the libreta economy withers and the gap between earnings and prices expands, people appear at the market to sell not only the big-ticket items like lobster or potatoes, but also things like eggs and plastic bags. Egg purchases are conducted swiftly, one eye on the transaction, another on the crowd to spot the inspector. I now understand the caution: There was so much corruption in the egg distribution system that in 2011, eight people received harsh prison sentences (up to fifteen years) for participating in an “egg mafia”— diverting the state-run egg supply to private, black-market networks.5 I also understand better another old Cuban joke and why egg scarcity is almost its own genre of humour: “If you want eggs, you should go to the newspaper offices to buy them, because they are always reporting on how great egg production is.”

  Humour is one response to problems that are obviously grave, and compounded by a frightening history: the “Special Period” of deprivation after the fall of the Soviet Union when the Cuban economy took a nosedive and daily caloric intake fell by almost 1000 calories per person. It was worse in the city; at least in the country people had the capacity to cultivate their food supply. People who survive extended periods of food insecurity tend to get extra jittery about knowing where their next meal, or shopping trip, will come from. North Americans with parents or grandparents who survived the Depression of the 1930s will recognize this condition. Almost any Cuban over the age of thirty-five probably has some memory of food deprivation, some more intense than others.

  To me, this adds extra layers of poignancy to the quest for daily bread. It’s a constant search, but the high points are in the early morning and late afternoon when the bodegas and panadarías are open. Havana’s always lively neighbourhoods really rev up during those periods. Women predominate in the market crowds. In a study of women’s daily lives in Havana in the early 2000s, Canadian researchers Cathy Krull and Melanie Davidson asked 160 women who helped them with the household cooking, shopping, and cleaning. Some 45 percent said no one and 11 percent said their spouse helped; the rest were divided between daughters and mothers.6 A history colleague at the University of Havana told me that one of the only good things about the Special Period was that men began to understand the value of women’s domestic work. “We’d be sitting in meetings at the university,” Sonia told me, “and all of a sudden someone would come in and announce that mangos were available in the market. Everyone, men and women both, would leave the meeting and run to their market to line up.” Little of this rethinking of men’s and women’s work has stuck, though older men and the occasional younger man are visible in the crowds of people who, like clockwork, twice daily fill the streets, carrying bags or wheeling small carts. The afternoon rush, which begins around five o’clock, is my favourite time in the city. A gentle, filtered light replaces the blinding harshness of the daytime sun and, despite a long day, people become more fluid in their movements. It is crowded, but the air isn’t exactly festive. Cuban shoppers are purposeful. Afternoon shopping reminds me of a song by Frank Delgado, a talented, funny chronicler of Cuban daily life. In “A Letter from a Cuban Child to Harry Potter,” he scoffs at Harry Potter’s magic abilities. “My mother makes magic three times a day,” he sings, “to create an alchemy with only three ingredients.”7

  All of this makes the extraordinarily good dinners I have enjoyed at friends’ houses in Havana even more special. A fully laid out dinner table at a Cuban home is a feast for the eyes. Salads look more like paintings or maybe mosaic sculptures: a festival of grated carrots and beets, finely sliced cucumbers, and tomatoes. The complexity of the display exists, I think, in inverse proportion to the simplicity of the ingredients. Typical Cuban specialties include black beans, fried plantain (tostones), and fritters (frituras) made from malanga, a root vegetable. Other vegetable delicacies are yucca (another root vegetable) drizzled with a garlic sauce, bright orange squash, and boniato, a sweet potato. When the Canadians visit at least, the table includes meat, usually pork or chicken, and very occasionally fish. My friends think I am being overly polite when I fill my plate with vegetable dishes and go lightly on the meat, because like poor people the world over Cubans prize meat. In truth, as good as the meat dishes are, I remain knocked out by Cuban produce because it is so ridiculously fresh. It is the original hundred-mile diet; almost no produce is imported for domestic consumption. When it is not mango season there are no mangos, period. On the rare occasion I am cooking alone, I have surveyed the contents of my fridge and, like Frank Delgado’s mother, prepared an exquisite meal for myself from little more than tomatoes, onions, garlic, and boniato. (If I had so few ingredients in Canada this would necessitate a rush to the grocery store or a call for takeout.)

  I know the depth of the love and friendship I experience at Havana dinner tables because I understand a little of what goes on behind the scenes. The trips to the multiple markets to acquire specific ingredients, or because the yucca didn’t show up in the local market that day; the line-ups; the negotiations with the neighbourhood cake lady about dessert; cleaning the little stones out of the rice or the beans; the hours spent in overheated kitchens peeling root vegetables and grating carrots. My Havana friends are always happy to receive the blockade-breaking things I bring from Canada, and we are good enough friends now that they usually ask me for things they need (at least the portable, inexpensive things). We don’t do an accounting, any more than I do with friends in Canada. But even if we did, my pre-departure trips to Costco have nothing on those dinner tables.

  BICYCLES AND BEAUTIFUL CAKES

  I wish I had kept a list of all the things I have seen people transport on bicycles in Havana, because I am sure I have missed something. Here’s what I can remember:

  *several slaughtered, skinned pigs, piled on top of each other

  *an enormous cake

  *cans of paint

  *heaping bags of flattened tin cans

  *a mattress

  *a dog (alive)

  *a TV set

  *three children (one in front, two behind)

  *thirty eggs, in an open cardboard container

  All of these were spectacular, but I marvel at the way Cubans transport cakes: on bicycles, on motorcycles, in buses, and of course on foot — perched, waiter-like, on one up-stretched hand, for effect. Many years ago as my kid was posing cutely in Old Havana, a random cake-carrier leaned in to photo bomb a beautiful shot. The cake was even cuter than the child. How the cakes survive excursions through Havana’s heat I have long puzzled over. I’m not fond of the taste of Cuban desserts; sweet is the overwhelming flavour of everything. But the presentation, the colours, and the reverence that goes into the making, buying, and transporting, that’s worth more than the price. They look like a bridesmaid’s dress: frilly and ornate, in pastel shades of pink or blue.

  Cuban stranger, cake, and Canadian child, Old Havana, 2004

  Maybe in a sugar economy a sweet tooth is inevitable. But I think the Cuban love of cake also stems from years of deprivation during the 1990s Special Period. Everybody has incredible Special Period survival stories, and they almost always centre on food. Sarita, a distinguished senior professor at the University of Havana, once told me her story of why she got married during the Special Period. It was one of those stories told with a practiced air; I think she tells it to everyone she meets. In Havana in 1993, everything was scarce and so everything was rationed. However, you could get permission to buy a cake for a wedding. Sarita’s son’s fifth birthday was coming up and she really wanted to get him a cake. So she and her partner spent two impromptu days lining up for a wedding licence, and organizing a quick ceremony so she could show up at the bakery, wedding licence in hand, to get a cake for her child. The punch line was that it tasted horrible. But it looked like a proper Cuban cake.

  PÁNFILO: THE JAMA JAMA GUY AS COLD WAR SUPERSTAR

  In the fall of 2009, Vilma, my Spanish teacher who
had just moved to Canada from Cuba, decided to use short clips from YouTube to help Susan and me step up our Cuban street Spanish. She randomly selected a clip that had become popular, an Afro-Cuban guy wandering down a Havana street, ranting about food (jama in the vernacular). But this wasn’t just any Havana street; this was the neighbourhood I’ve been staying in for years. The guy on the screen is ranting right in front of the vegetable market beside the apartment we usually rent. And it isn’t just any random Cuban guy; it’s Pánfilo.

  To over one million (and counting) YouTube viewers, Pánfilo’s one-minute video became a symbol of the sorry state of the Cuban economy. He sees a camera and wanders into an interview on the street. A US crew is filming a documentary about Cuban reggaetón. He interrupts. He begins yelling, saying the word jama repeatedly. Everyone is starving here, he yells; there is no food in Cuba. He emphasizes by gesturing, putting his hands in his empty, open mouth. Then he wanders off, stumbling as he goes.

  I’ve seen Pánfilo (a nickname he shares with a popular Cuban comedian) wander drunk down the street plenty of times. I’ve heard his distinctive voice, raspy and loud, from my third floor balcony. I’ve learned how to avoid him when I’m on my way home, though he appears more annoying than dangerous. Sometimes he pees in public, but so do lots of Cuban males, probably not all of them drunk.

  The jama jama video was posted on YouTube and went viral. Why is Pánfilo all of a sudden a star? What makes him different from any other drunken guy wandering and ranting down any street, any place? To some extent, old-style racism accounts for this instant popularity: there is an air of the old black minstrel show in his performance. But, once again, the shadow of the Cold War is always present, ultimately, in just about everything that happens in Cuba. The Cuban authorities arrested him for delinquency. “Free Pánfilo” groups were organized in Miami (known as Jama y Libertad, Food and Freedom). A Florida human rights organization adopted him as a prisoner of conscience.