14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodriguez, Havana, 20 September 2024 – Going from hell to heaven – or at least to purgatory – is a question of temperature. This is well know by the habaneros who go from the state run cafeteria Hamburgo to its neighbour, Fress. At the former, customers are welcomed by a massive wave of heat; in the independent establishment the air conditioning is working and the atmosphere is pleasant. This is just one of the many differences between the two premises in Plaza de Carlos III in central Havana.
Hamburgo suffers from every possible problem that a state run cafeteria could have, but its central location and its overheated atmosphere make the ordeal of eating there even more noticeable. In the words of the waitresses – whose ill-humour is even more of a fixture than the daily menu – it’s not that the air conditioning is switched off, but that “it’s on so low that it’s more like a gasp, it’s nothing”. Customers leave the place convinced that even a gasp would be more refreshing than the actual steam that the cooling system puts out.
Fress honours its name, which sort of sounds like the English ’fresh’. The place has fallen on its feet after many ups and downs since it started out, and now it puts Hamburgo in the shade. The bright red decor in the latter contributes to the feeling of being inside a “microwave oven”, as one diner put it.
Up there in the corner of the ceiling, the air conditioning contributes to the noise in the cafeteria. At the tables closest to it you can hear the machine spluttering. It’s using up electricity and the idea of keeping it turned down low is supposedly to save power, but it’s pointless, that doesn’t work.
It’s clear that the air conditioning is “dragging” electricity out of the place: more than a few of the lights are blinking – an effect that gives the whole scene the feeling of a horror movie. Apart from that, there are inattentive and irritated staff, tasteless and sugarless fruit juices – “they’re diet drinks!”, jokes one customer – and the menu’s star attraction, the hamburger, couldn’t look more different from how it appears in the marketing. On the poster, the disc of ground meat is juicy and greasy; in the actual item, a squalid sheet of protein is all you get under the bread.
Hamburgo sells Parranda beer for 180 pesos and an imported one (oddly) for five pesos less. Juices and soft drinks cost between 90 and 100; the Super Hamburger – pork and beef, ham and vegetables – costs 550. Cheaper ones cost between 275 and 300 pesos. Ham is often unavailable.
The bill for two people can reach up to 1,500 pesos, but in Cuba no one is shocked any more by inflation, which – unlike the hamburger – is solid and you feel it in your stomach. Sweating and fed up with it all, the customers take their last bites of Hamburgo’s star attraction and leave. Nearby there’s a perfume shop, where it’s the air conditioning, at midday, that attracts more customers than the eau de cologne.
Translated by Ricardo Recluso
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