Eating in Cuba

Bringing four plates to the table for four mouths is a mission impossible for Ana Carballo, 37, a teacher at a secondary school. With a little luck she gets a chunk of pork and some beans. But then she is missing the meat and the vegetables. And dessert? Forget it.

The food, as Cubans call the evening meal, and the snack for her children are her biggest anxiety. She gets up at 5 in the morning to buy bread on the ration book. A bread roll cost 3 pesos if it’s soft. If it’s hard, 10 pesos for the whole loaf, and 5 pesos for a half. “I have to buy extra bread on Mondays and Fridays, to be able to prepare the snack for my two children, 8 and 10,” Ana says.

The school snack is a puzzle for almost all parents. The children are in school for 8 hours and the lunch is a real hodgepodge. As a result, the little ones take bulging backpacks, as if they were going camping every day.

Tomás Díaz, 56 years old, driver for a business, takes advantage of his bosses’ minor negligence and with the State car takes himself to the closest farmers’ market, to buy meat, beans and vegetables. And if the money is flowing, one or two pounds of pork or a leg of lamb. Like Tomás, the number of workers who use the work day to leave and resolve the food problem is high.

Because the hours for businesses, shops and farmers’ markets don’t help in the least those who work for the State. They are usually open from 9 in the morning to 6 in the evening, but always, with the habitual sloth of our workers, they open a half-hour late and close 30 minutes early.

Even the official press, which usually sees everything through rose-colored glasses, has published reports on this subject. But nothing has changed. Any day of the week you can walk through the center of the city, and you will see the streets and shops full of people. Trying to get sustenance with the national money (the Cuban peso).

When some CUCs (convertible Cuban pesos = “hard” currency) fall their way, they’re used to buy bouillon cubes, seasoning, oil or some cheap sausage, like hot dogs (“little dogs”), made out of chicken – a pack of 10 costs 1.10 CUC, the equivalent of about 30 pesos, almost three times the daily salary of a worker. A typical meal for the poorer classes in Cuba is rice with black or red beans, and an egg in all its variations: fried, boiled, omelette, or scrambled. The middle class, composed of those Cubans who receive remittances or in some way manage to get hard currency (CUCs), is also used to eating rice and beans, but accompanied by pork meat or chicken, and a tomato, lettuce or cucumber salad. If they recently received dollars from their relatives, they can give themselves the luxury of buying the desired beef on the black market, or fish like sea bream or garfish, or shrimp.

The table of the upper class – government officials, successful artists and hotel managers, among others – has nothing to envy from their equals in Miami or Madrid at dinner time. They even have white or red wine with dinner. But these are the minority.

A large percentage of the Cuban population has to scratch their heads every day, and their pockets. And one more time draw out the count, to see if that night they can eat something hot. Beginning in 1993, when Fidel Castro took away the penalty on the American dollar, many Cubans could get food, clothing and shoes of better quality, almost all imported. Of course they couldn’t do it with the frequency they wanted, but when they had dollars, they got the consumer bug. If nothing more than to buy flat-screen televisions or computers.

Although, according to an employee in one of the shops at the Comodoro commercial center in Miramar, the elite Havana neighborhood, every time there are more prostitutes and Cubans, she can’t figure out where they are getting the money. They buy very expensive furniture, electronic articles and construction material to repair their homes.

At the other extreme is Lourdes Garrido, 59 years old, who only goes to the shopping centers to press her nose against the glass windows and look at what she cannot buy. She and her five-year-old grand-daughter go every Saturday to visit the shops in Havana, like Zara, Adidas or Mango. There they fantasize about the pretty clothing and the good perfume they would like to have.

While that moment lasts, Garrido and her grand-daughter feel happy and are satisfied that they can enter, free, into these exclusive shops and see things that for the moment they can only dream about. But they hope that some day they can buy them.