Apologies for my lengthy hiatus from writing here on the blog. An explanation is in order. The morning after the Alabama Supper I boarded a train from Tuscaloosa to Atlanta and the following day I flew to Havana, Cuba for a month of work. I was there documenting a cultural exchange between an American theater director and Cuban actors. But this was no ordinary work trip. Cuba is a complicated and stimulating place filled with contradictions at every turn. The ideals of the Revolution butt against the reality of daily life in the country, where intelligent and well-educated people are constantly underemployed and struggle to buy basic goods. The people I met weren’t starving, and had all their basic needs supplied for them by the government. But the lack of any expendable income and the fierce travel restrictions seems to crush the ambition of many Cubans. Even my Cuban friends acknowledged the intense paradoxes at the heart of their lives. But they don’t let it get them down. They’re a happy people who work through their frustrations by laughing, dancing, and drinking lots of rum. There’s something to be said for that kind of therapy.
And then there’s the aesthetics of Havana itself. If you think of a city as a living organism, it's almost as if the city of Havana stopped growing in 1959. Yet the people there kept on going with their lives - getting married, having babies, growing old. So what has emerged is mostly a life among the ruins. Dilapidated buildings with generations of crumbling paint, ancient American cars like Desotos and Studebakers retro-fitted with Soviet-era Lada engines, Habana Vieja, the oldest and most touristy part of the city which simultaneously summons both Tuscan squares and Bourbon Street, and the once stately now broke-down mansions of Vedado in the center part of the city, reconverted from living spaces to everything from clinics to auto repair shops. It's an unbelievable and almost inconceivable place. By the end of my stay I felt like the things I didn't understand about the country could fill many volumes, while the few things I did understand I could tell you in a few sentences. If you’re at all interested in Cuba, there was a great piece in the New York Times Magazine published about a month ago. I was fortunate to have spotty internet access and was able to read the piece while I was in Havana.
Take a look here if you’d like.
While I wasn't there on any food related work, this project has made us all hyperaware of the foodways that surround us. I was looking for good local food the minute I stepped off the plane. But searching out local foodways in a different language in a country that tries to shield outsiders from the everyday lives of its citizens proved at first to be difficult. My first few meals in Havana were terribly uninspired and uninteresting. Most of the tourist food is without celebration - decidedly bland, not all too fresh, and ridiculously expensive compared to the average Cuban’s monthly salary. For instance, the first night I was there we went to a tourist restaurant in one of the larger hotels in Miramar. I had a smallish and boring “marinara” pizza that ran about $8. Most Cubans make between $15-20 a month.
As Joe mentioned in his
post about Cuba a while back, Alabama is one of Cuba’s largest agricultural trading partners. Alabama agriculture producers did about $120 million worth of sales to Cuba in 2007. It’s a bizarre facet of our embargo that doesn’t get a lot of attention. So I can make an assumption that, even though I wasn’t intentionally eating Alabama while I was there, Alabama products most likely made their way onto my plate a handful of times. But my real interest in eating was to eat as much local food as possible, and to that end I was initially frustrated. That is, until I discovered the agro.
There are supermarkets in Havana, but they’re mostly filled with processed goods and a few frozen meats and vegetable medleys. I could never find an ounce of fresh produce. That’s because the fresh produce is all at the mercado agro (essentially government run farmer’s markets). The agros supply all the fresh fruit and vegetables grown on the island. There are dozens around the city which vary in sizes - some are simply a table with a few tomatoes while others cover half a city block. Below are some photos from the one I visited most frequently. The fruit and vegetables were unbelievably tasty, like the best organic vegetables grown here in Alabama. That’s because without exception they were organically produced – naturally grown and free of pesticides and fertilizers. How is this possible?
For those not up on contemporary Cuban history, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba went into a deep economic depression. The Soviets, for obvious reasons, were Cuba’s principle trading partner, and their demise spelled an economic disaster for Cuba. During the height of the Soviet Empire, Cuba developed an agriculture system that relied heavily on fertilizer and pesticides. When the Soviet oil stopped flowing into Cuba so too did the costly fertilizer that was supporting their industrial, Soviet style agriculture system. For those few years - what Castro referred to as “The Special Period” - Cubans faced widespread food shortages and transportation breakdowns. What does this mean? Cubans caloric intake dropped by a third during the Special Period. Their diet was hovering around 3,000 calories a day, but during the crisis they took in about 2,000 calories per day. That’s like everyone you know missing one meal, every day, for weeks and years.
The only real agricultural choice the Cubans had was to go organic - to remake their food system without fertilizers and pesticides. They rebuilt their soil with nitrogen fixers, they began rotating crops, and they took composting very seriously. It’s ironic that cheap oil has made industrial agriculture our inexpensive solution to feeding all the people while organic produce remains a viable choice for only those with ways and means. In Cuba everyone is poor and everyone eats organic. Complicated, indeed.
So, while Cuba still struggles on a variety of economic fronts, at least their caloric intake has risen to pre-Special Period levels. Most meals for Cubans consist of rice and beans with fresh vegetables and maybe pork if there’s a guest. In fact, that’s what I was served in a home I visited during my filming. My friend Roberto and his wife were kind enough to give me a hearty meal of Yucca, rice, beans, and pork with a wonderful fresh garlic vinegar sauce. There on the right of the plate you'll see another Cuban specialty - french fries. They're pretty much everywhere you turn. But potatoes are actually hard to come by. Looking for them one day at the agro I asked a vendor, one of dozens at the market, if he had any because they were nowhere to be seen. He said, "No, no, no..." like it was crazy to look for them. Then, he gave a nod and a wink - the universal language of the black market - toward a man nearby who gestured for me to follow. We walked out in the street and negotiated. I gave him the equivalent of about $2, which he promptly gave to another young man standing nearby. He in turn walked into a nearby house and another man emerged with a plastic bag tied tightly. Everyone casting furtive glances over their shoulder, my hookup delivered the goods - about 5 lbs of earthstained fresh potatoes. Turns out that most potatoes on the island are rationed and that buying them in the agro is illegal, hence the black market trade outside.
If studying about the history of Cuban agriculture seems like a worthy pastime, checkout
this wonderful Harper's article from a few years back. You can also take a look at a
documentary made about the subject. But enough about Cuba already. Here are some photos from the agro...
1. Another one bites the dust. It's back. Captain Salmonella strikes again, this time tainting our peanuts, sending food companies into a frenzy of peanut product recall, and hundreds of consumers to the hospitals. More than 125 products containing peanut butter and/or peanut paste from the Peanut Corporation of America plant in Blakely, GA have been recalled, marked with the proverbial scarlet letter (S is for salmonella), reminding us just how vulnerable our food system really is. An AP article, noted that peanuts were considered to be low-risk for salmonella, and that:
2. Food Matters. Mark Bittman is at it again. In his new book, Food Matters, Bittman dishes out the food wisdom so often shared in his New York Times columns - a few of which I've mentioned in this blog. If you want to change the world, start by changing what's on your plate.
3. Food Police. A not-so nice critique of Alice Waters and - what the author believes to be - the waning local foods revolution. He writes:
4. New Chef in the White House. The Obamas hire a new chef, Sam Kass, to help prepare meals in the White House. According to the NYT, Kass, who often cooked for the Obamas in Chicago, has a "particular interest in healthy and local foods". Arugula salads all around!
