Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh

by Unknown

  I met with no officials, took no specially arranged tours, and wandered wherever I wished. I did not enter the country to promote Cuban cigars, lobby for Cuban-American trade, or advocate the cause of some Cuban shortstop unfairly denied the right to earn $7 million a year in the Major Leagues. Traveling in this manner meant nobody was around to prevent me from asking impoverished Cubans how they felt about the glorious times tourists like me were having while they barely exist on rationed staples, no luxuries, and salaries averaging $10 a month.

  I heard the same word over and over again. Whenever I asked for an explanation of the appalling inequities in their so-called workers’ paradise, Cubans would offer a one-word explanation: “contradictions.” It is F O R K I T O V E R

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  the standard explanation for everything incomprehensible about Cuba.

  Why does Fidel Castro have a reported fifty-seven homes in a country with intolerable housing shortages? “Contradictions.” Why does a country with more doctors per capita than anywhere else on earth have no aspirin? “Contradictions.” Even highly educated professionals accept this excuse. Whenever the word is spoken, it is expressed with a shrug, much like a medieval peasant blaming a famine on “God’s will.” When everything in life is controlled by a supreme being—in Cuba, Castro is referred to as El Commandante—much forbearance is required of the populace.

  Shabbily treated they may be, but no Cuban I met expressed unqualified admiration for the United States. I spoke to a professor, a teacher, an economist, and a researcher. Each one of them, at some time in our conversation, ceased being amiable long enough to protest the U.S. embargo of Cuba, which has been in effect for thirty-seven years and has accomplished little politically but caused incalculable dam-age economically. It is at least as responsible as Castro’s inflexibility for the hardships that the Cuban people endure.

  I arrived in Cuba expecting to find desperation. I came away awed by the patience and loyalty of an incredibly stressed populace. I thought Nilsa epitomized the stoicism of the typical Cuban. After I read her a list of everything I’d eaten from the breakfast buffet of the Melia Cohiba Hotel, she laughed without envy and said, “For me that is food for fifteen or twenty days.” We talked about life in America. I told her that while she would have no difficulty eating well in America, her housing conditions would almost certainly decline were she to leave Havana for an apartment in New York or Miami. The small detached paint-peeling two-bedroom Spanish-style bungalow she owns was built in the 1950s in what was then a middle-class section of Havana. She has one semifunctional bathroom (fixing the toilet would cost about three dollars, which she does not have), a nonfunctional Russian TV, a megalithic Frigidaire she described as “bellisimo,” cracks in the walls and ceilings, and a pump to deliver water from the street to her cistern.

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  Even though she considered my tales of less-than-commodious living in America far-fetched, she insisted that she is not one of those who think the streets are paved in gold. Nodding in the direction of a cousin who walked into her house without a greeting and started making telephone calls without asking, she said, “He is one of those who think when they arrive in the United States they will pick dollar bills from the trees.”

  Havana, once magnificent, now crumbling, has become Pompeii with people. Little of the city as it appeared in the early twentieth century remains intact, although the remnants of a city of taste and culture are stunning. So many of the stucco buildings, their pastel colors leached out, their exteriors crumbling, look like scratching posts for giant cats.

  Wrought-iron balconies are rusted husks. In Old Havana, eighteenth-century palaces constructed with twelve-foot ceilings have been recon-figured into twentieth-century slums with six-foot ceilings, providing twice as many floors for the impoverished to reside.

  Whenever I met a Cuban citizen, I had a single goal: to try to com-prehend what makes life in Havana not only bearable but, to many, defensible. A Socialist utopia Havana is not. The average citizen has insufficient food, little or no access to everyday necessities such as vita-mins and toothpaste, minimum clothing, inadequate public transportation, no freedom of speech, genuine fear of tyrannical and arbitrary punishment, and a knowledge that life under Marxism has gotten pro-gressively worse since the breakup of the Soviet Union (and the loss of its estimated annual subsidy of $5 billion to 7 billion). Yet of those I interviewed, only the medical-school professor sounded disillusioned.

  He told me that Cuba was close to a “social explosion” and only Castro’s charisma was keeping the country together.

  What Cuba does offer its citizens, in abundance, is education and health care (although the redirection of medical supplies to dollar-paying foreign patients may be eroding even that). Those benefits, along with a profusion of paramilitary police on street corners, have helped save Cuba from stumbling into a kind of Mad Max, postapocalyptic F O R K I T O V E R

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  state, although there are signs that even the steadfast intellectuals who have been at the core of Castro’s support are becoming weary. A seventy-year-old retired economist, a man who worked so tirelessly for the revolution in the sixties that it broke up his marriage, told me this joke:

  “A Cuban went to the U.S. and asked for political asylum. He was interviewed and proudly said that one of the achievements of the revolution was free health care and free education, the best in the world.

  He was asked, ‘If it’s such a great country, why are you leaving?’ The Cuban replied, ‘Because you are not always sick or studying.’ ” There are few luxuries remaining in Havana, and none I came across that was equally accessible to tourists and citizens. In a mid-city park devoted entirely to the consumption of ice cream, tourists need not wait for their dollar-denominated sundaes, while Cubans stand in lines of more than two hundred for a chance to spend a few pesos on a treat. As I sat at a marble-topped table, Cubans in line only twenty feet away stood with their backs turned, ignoring me and my effortlessly obtained ice cream.

  Havana does not offer many diversions, even for a tourist. Cuban cooking is a lost art, which is understandable, inasmuch as food is a lost staple. Although the city is almost surrounded by water, it has no beaches of note. I had no luck finding the kind of music I yearned for, the old Ricky-Ricardo-meets-Guy-Lombardo sounds, swarthy men playing songs of love. Havana certainly has the worst shopping in the world; its downtown stores are shells.

  The real attraction of Havana is the opportunity to view an incredible, tottering, real-life Communist-led Socialist state: men and women walking around with ID cards, destitute children wearing almost no clothes, ration books corroborating near-starvation diets, nonworking appliances in almost every home, and a once-admirable cuisine reduced to sandwiches for one and all. In Havana a tourist can experience the sordid thrill of dispensing dollar bills to downcast citizens, much like John D.

  Rockefeller handing out Depression-era dimes. Ever since the Cuban government legalized the use of the dollar and sanctioned the establishment of so-called hard-currency stores that stock necessities 1 1 8

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  unavailable for pesos, American banknotes have become the currency of survival.

  The cost of my unconscionable breakfast buffet at the Melia Cohiba Hotel was twice Nilsa’s monthly pension of $7.65, calculated at the rate of twenty pesos to the dollar. While the government might argue that what a Cuban citizen pays for food, housing, and utilities is minus-cule, what makes such reasoning untenable is that everyone who lives in Havana requires dollars to live decently, and the only people with legal access to dollars are those with generous relatives in the United States and those with tourist-industry jobs that lead to tips. People in the street beg for dollars. They no longer want slivers of soap or spare toothbrushes; that state of innocence is long gone. The difference between what tourists have to spend on luxuries and what Cubans have to spend on necessities is so extreme that it
seems impossible that the country can survive such seismic inequities.

  The medical-school professor told me his salary in pesos was way above average, but he had difficulty living because he had no way to obtain dollars. He was wearing a ragged T-shirt, worn polyester slacks, and shoes crafted from unknown polymers. He said, “To me the end of the revolution started with the legalization of the dollar. I remember this day. On the night of 26 July 1993, Castro has spoken in Santiago de Cuba to explain the necessity of the revolution to survive. At this time, there were many people in jail because they had dollars and it is forbidden. From this time in Cuba, there are two different people: people who have dollars and people who cannot have dollars, and this is a very big difference. Today Cuba is a ghetto, enclosed not by bars but by dollars. If you have dollars, you go beyond that borderline.” I invited him to La Piazza, an informal Italian restaurant in the Melia Cohiba Hotel, where he ate pizza and drank Heineken beer ravenously and gratefully. His state of near destitution reminded me of another joke I heard—Socialist-state humor is almost always triggered by despair. The joke, told by my guide, went like this: “A guy is drunk in a public place, bragging to everybody that he is a porter at a hotel, that he has a lot of money. The police take him to jail, call his mother.

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  She comes to the station, explains to the police that her son has a drinking problem. They tell her how he was shouting, disturbing people, telling everybody he is the porter of the hotel. The mother says, ‘He is suffering delusions of grandeur. He is just the director of the research center.’ ”

  Everybody knows how revolutions start, with poverty, oppression, and tyranny. (Cuba had the bonus of a few too many American gang-sters in residence.) But it is less clear how they collapse. My guess is that the end of Castro’s Cuba will be the strains of tourism, the inevitable decadence that is already seeping into the most indomitable Socialist state remaining on earth.

  To the hunger strikers, I was better than manna from heaven. I represented the American free press. I was exactly who they were hoping to see, even if my first question carelessly referred to their action as an

  “anti-Castro protest.” To most Americans, Castro and Cuba have become synonymous. We think of him as the savior, the oppressor, the Wizard of Oz. A leader of the strike, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet of the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, gently pointed out that the five hunger strikers in the room were engaged in a “human-rights activity” condemning the imprisonment of persons who had protested government abuses.

  I had telephoned the home of Biscet, a well-known dissident, and his wife suggested I visit him at the hunger strike. I took a taxi to the protest, an eight-dollar fare to go from a luxury hotel to the front lines of a nonviolent war against the Cuban political system. I arrived on the thirty-first day of the forty-day demonstration.

  The small ground-floor apartment where the protest was taking place had walls covered with photos of international leaders who had refined the art of peaceful opposition: Raoul Wallenberg (who saved Jews from the Nazis), Martin Luther King, Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Andrei Sakharov, and, stretching the definition of humanitar-ianism, Jorge Mas Canosa, the late leader of the Cuban American National Foundation, an anti-Castro organization that continues to operate stridently in Miami.

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  One of those in the small room was Juan Gregorich, a drawn, sal-low man with deep lines in his face who had spent twenty-two years in jail as a political prisoner, although he admitted not all his actions had been nonviolent ones. He had burned a sugarcane field, written subversive graffiti, and aided anti-Castro guerrillas. For this he was sentenced to forty-nine years, but he was released in 1988. The four others were members of associations that track persons prosecuted and jailed for human-rights and political activities.

  I pointed out how lovely everything in Cuba seemed to a happy tourist like me. Politely, careful not to offend, they informed me that they lived in a “terror regime” with paramilitary police and neighborhood informers, which is the reason I was able to enjoy the artificial calm that envelops Cuba.

  Biscet called Cuba not a Socialist country but a totalitarian, Stalin-ist country, and said that he and his fellow protesters could go to jail for twenty years, or there could be “accidents” and they could be killed. They told me that in the old days they would already have been arrested, but the collapse of the Communist bloc and the loss of the subsidies from the former Soviet Union “have chained Castro’s hands tight—that’s why we haven’t been shot.” I went directly from the hunger strike to El Floridita, the most famous and expensive restaurant in Havana. Sitting in the quiet circular room, surrounded by red-jacketed waiters, felt very prerevolution.

  The food served at El Floridita might not bring about the downfall of Castro, but I’m surprised it hasn’t liquidated tourism. It couldn’t be worse. The forty-two-dollar lobster thermidor came in a generic white sauce and tasted as though it had been made from frozen lobster, even though the local lobster is so prized only government-certified restaurants are permitted to serve it.

  The “tournedos of beef Papa,” made with the limp, flavorless beef found in Cuba, were not edible. Ernest Hemingway has been elevated to the status of Havana’s most marketable icon, with Che Guevara (found on the collectible three-peso note) a distant second. The bar of F O R K I T O V E R

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  El Floridita is filled with melancholy photographs of Hemingway with Spencer Tracy, Hemingway with Errol Flynn, Hemingway with Castro.

  In the photos, he looks blurry, out of focus. The Hemingway daiquiri, served ungarnished in a tall glass, was a yellowish, unsweetened, cold sludge.

  Of all the government-run restaurants I tried, only El Aljibe was interesting, in part because it looks like a cross between a Seminole Indian lodge and a Connecticut Indian casino. The one huge room, with a ceiling at least thirty feet high, seats hundreds, and almost everybody eats chicken. When I suggested to my waitress that I would like something other than the highly regarded chicken, she panicked, deserted her post, and had to be replaced. I assured the substitute that I’d be happy with the chicken, which was lemony and good. I also admired an odd but appealing Chinese restaurant called Chung Shan Los Dos Dragones, located about a block from the center of Havana’s tiny Chinatown section. It was always filled with customers, had a genuine liveliness no other restaurant could match, and offered the best dish for the money ($4.50) in Havana, lobster chop suey. I never was able to determine whether this place was sanctioned by the government or if the off-the-menu lobster chop suey was legal, but I went back several times.

  The restaurants known as paladares are superior in almost every way to the government-run establishments, although almost none have air-conditioning, a debilitating deficiency. Paladares are twelve-seat (legal maximum) family-run (hiring outside help is forbidden) restaurants of surprising competence located in the foyers and dining rooms or on the patios and terraces of private homes. At almost all I visited, the spaces were comfortable, the food at least satisfactory, and the service totally charming—invariably, the youngest and prettiest woman in the extended family is pressed into waitress duty.

  When a paladar offered fish, that’s almost always what I ordered, because fish cookery, for some reason, has survived in the home kitchen.

  A French-style paladar called La Chansonnier had the best food overall, including rabbit in mustard sauce and admirable french fries. I 1 2 2

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  also liked Puerto Isabela, for its open terrace, unusually large menu, and two particularly skillful fish dishes—red snapper “primavera,” with a layer of finely diced vegetables covering the fillet, and red snapper “sobre-uso,” with an oniony tomato sauce. Puerto Isabela served an incredibly sweet but appealing dessert, a strong, monastery-style cheese with a choice of guava or coconut puree.

  Although Cuba professes to be a nation free of raci
al prejudice—

  one of Havana’s wistful sights is dark-eyed black street urchins in rags splashing through puddles alongside blond, blue-eyed white street urchins in rags—I encountered almost no blacks working in restaurants. Supposedly, whites, blacks, and mulatos are all accepted as equals, but I don’t recall being waited on by anybody who wasn’t light-skinned.

  My search for a black-run restaurant took me to the wonderfully named Juana La Cubana, a paladar located in the rear of a building I never would have entered had my guide not patted my hand and assured me I’d emerge whole.

  On the porch of this once-grand residence, shirtless men sat unsmiling in rickety chairs. They were not maître d’s. I nodded ingratiatingly as we approached, and their expressions did not change. Inside, a long hallway was lined with makeshift miniature apartments built of plywood or other scrap materials, and the marble floor was littered with broken couches and wobbly tables. (In Havana, much should be thrown out but almost nothing is.) I felt as though I had wandered into a shantytown where the luckless emerge blinking into the sunlight to forage for food, yet this was the site of a well-regarded local dining establishment. So popular is Juana La Cubana, located in a relatively large apartment at the end of the hallway, that eighteen people were waiting for tables.

  The dining area turned out to be a bedroom where the mattress and the box spring had been raised up and flattened against the wall, Murphy-bed style. A window air conditioner provided ventilation, of sorts. Prices were set in pesos, and forty pesos, the equivalent of two dollars, bought a meal of salad with avocado and impossibly tasty leg of pork. With me at dinner was a forty-nine-year-old scientific researcher F O R K I T O V E R