14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 6 October 2024 — Yes, I also got carried away by nostalgia and went to a Cuban restaurant in Madrid. I’m not going to say which one, because the life of an emigrant is hard, and setting up a business – a pitiful one, but I’m getting ahead of myself – is already quite indigestible. But a fish dies by its mouth and so did I. In general, since I arrived in this country I have led a fairly private life. I have gotten together with few Cubans, more out of my unfriendliness than my lack of patriotism, because abroad there is a taste for the national junk that I fight against like hell.
I will never forget that waiter who, idiotic and melancholic, wanted me to give him a box of Ramón Allones cigars that I had brought from the Island. They were limited edition cigars, in green cedar packaging, a farewell gift – I would never have been able to pay for those jewels – the last one of which I burned down a few weeks ago. But look, the lad didn’t want to smoke. He didn’t tolerate the taste or smell, but he inhaled the butt. He wanted the box, the ark of the alliance, to deposit the remains of his Cubanness. I promised him that I would send it to him as soon as I had a chance.
Everyone knows that Madrid is the new Miami. The lycras and flip-flops, the despicable “asere qué bolá” (whasup, dude?) that any Cuban offers as a password of origin, the watering hole and the gossip, have taken possession of Chamberí, Puerta del Sol and Barajas. In the clueless Spanish imagination, Cuba was at first a land of promise, then a communist paradise and now – as in Dian Fossey’s famous book – a good place to have a mojito among gorillas. My newly arrived compatriots fervently cultivate their image of the noble savage, or at least the savage part. They change country, but not what’s inside their heads.
I paid the price of being waited on in my accent and enjoyed tiny portions: socialist, regulated by the ration book
It is not illogical, therefore, that if someone opens a Cuban restaurant in Madrid, they proceed to recreate our misery on a gastronomic scale. I was – unpleasant journey in time and space – in a Havana restaurant, in an inn with peeling walls, Cuban bric-a-brac, photos of the Capitolio and el Morro. I paid the price of being waited on in my accent, I waited in vain for a glass for the beer – Crystal, packaged in Holguín! – and I enjoyed tiny portions: socialist, regulated by the ration book.
Of course I deserved it. A few blocks away there were two Asturian restaurants where I would have felt at home. Not because Asturias is for me a gastronomic homeland – which it almost is – but because a well-made stew of beans, pork and other ingredients will always remind a Cuban of his origins; a slice of quince with cheese or a rice pudding, grandma’s desserts; a grape liqueur with a cigar, the perfect ending to a lunch.
There was something sumptuous and generous in the Creole, something that the Regime castrated and that the exile should have preserved. Why do Cubans travel to Spain asking for hamburgers and Coca-Cola? Why have they been saving to buy a car the first year when there is so little need here? Why the rush to forget the best of the country and cultivate the most rude, the vulgarity inherent in Castroism, the impudencence of the “New Man“?
I was looking for an experience that would bring me closer to my past, and they made the present bitter
That Madrid restaurant was a perfect summary of all that. Dishes, the basics: tasteless stews, steak, tostones, dry congrí. I was looking for an experience that would bring me closer to my past, and they made the present bitter. It’s useless to ask for explanations or hit the table – plastic, of course, no stools – with your fists. There it was the Government’s fault; whose is it here? To the “lacón,*” laconic questions, Lezama would say.
Where can Cuba find itself? For a long time I thought it was in books, but looking for a country in the library, without a real experience, is an exercise in archaeology. A bolero is heard and forgotten; a cigar is smoked; a language is used; a son lives not on the Island that his parents abandoned but on another continent, under its flag.
I don’t think the Cuban, in his usual light-heartedness, will notice that this gentleness now means very little. Does anyone care? Not me; now you know. Over time one finds grace for oneself if not elsewhere. If I went back, I would be a stranger. If I stay here, there will always be an air of provisionality wherever I am. Almost an act of cheap magic, a snap of the fingers, and I left, as I vanished from that Cuban restaurant in Madrid. Wasn’t that what Martí was referring to before pronouncing, in the swamp, his best spell? “I know how to disappear.” And he did.
*Translator’s note: A “lacón” is a pig’s head; hence, the play on words.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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