The Cuban Diet and the Politics of Hunger / Alexis Romay

Del refranero, por Garrincha

Today I didn’t need my morning coffee. I woke up to a pair of articles about the profound socio-economic crisis in Cuba, which became acute in the early nineties with the collapse of the socialist bloc. What those champions of euphemism called “The Special Period.” One of the articles, in Spanish, was published by that usually faithful friend of Cuba’s Granma newspaper, El País, from Madrid; the other, in English, appeared in The Independent, from London.

Both were based on a study published today by the British Medical Journal. About what? Hunger. But not the infamy of starving a population. That’s in poor taste. About hunger as a cure for obesity. The thesis that unites them is simple: while we ate cabbage as appetizer, main course and dessert —the first person plural is intentional: I experienced this first-hand—, we were doing a favor to the nutritionists and cardiologists of the first world, who then would go around shouting to the four winds that the lower the body weight, the lower the cardiovascular mortality. “A textbook example in real life,” declared a Spanish scientist who wasn’t part of the “experiment,” although what he really wanted to say is: “they were dying of hunger, but not of heart disease.”

It turns out that when Cubans were fainting on their bikes, or being overcome by polyneuritis —a severe inflammation of multiple nerves— or simply dying from lack of food, this was part of a long-range plan: to demonstrate to the British Medical Journal, to the international press —and to the world at large— that if you take food and transportation away from a population, the trouser sizes of men and women will be drastically reduced. One can’t but wonder why they don’t also recommend trying bulimia and anorexia.

Although separated by language, both articles have in common a contempt for the Cuban people, and they remind one of the great achievements of tropical totalitarianism: The Castro brothers have not only created a theme park so that those who love far off utopia have an island as a point of reference and place to visit; even before that, they have made Cuba into a giant laboratory where every human being is a guinea pig.

Illustration: Santana.

10 April 2013