The Bizarre Truth

by Andrew Zimmern

  That night, we drove to Vinales, another UNESCO World Heritage site. This place is breathtakingly gorgeous, like Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay without the water. Giant granite pillars rise up from a flat valley high above the central Cuban hillside. This area, with its ideal volcanic soil, perfect growing climate, and local population—everything is done by hand—makes Vinales ground zero for what is regarded as the world’s best tobacco.

  Tobacco holds a special place in Cuban history. Historically, it was used as medicine, food, for social rites and religious ceremonies, and as offerings or gifts. People believe the crop has miraculous powers, which is an interesting viewpoint as seen from the States, where tobacco use is chastised. However, it seems even smoking’s biggest opponents find merit in handcrafted Cuban cigars. They truly are of unparalleled quality, and considering the skill that goes into creating these stogies, it’s easy to understand why they reign supreme. Cuba still implements traditional technique when it comes to agricultural production. Farmers work with oxen and homemade tills fashioned on anvils and attached to wooden frames. It’s a completely different way of life. I spent a day picking tobacco, racking it in the field on cured split timber, then helped lay it into the aging house, where it would dry for up to a year. After that, the tobacco is fermented or cured—what the locals call The Fever, because during this process the leaves are usually spritzed with liquid (often rum) and covered with special tarps for several days. If you lay your hands on the pile during this process, it is actually a few degrees warmer than the rest of the barn due to the bacteriological process. After the curing, and some more aging if need be, the leaves are trimmed of large stems and the tobacco shipped to the famous Havana factories, where the stuff is graded, smaller veins and stems are removed, and leaves are classified according to color, texture, and leaf type. I had the privilege of enjoying a smoke in the Cifuentes family’s renowned Partagás factory, in the VIP lounge no less, with Ganselmo, who works as the head catador, or quality-control expert. This man is responsible for the consistency and quality found in the world’s greatest cigars—from Cohiba to Partagás, he creates them all. He typically tests between three and five cigars a day. It works a lot like wine tasting—he smokes only a small portion of each cigar before rating each one, drinking only unsweetened black tea to cleanse his palate between tests. I witnessed the whole cigar-making process, from stem to stern, even the rolling, which is an incredible experience. Cuban cigar rollers, called torcedores, spend nearly two and a half years perfecting their skills. Achieving master roller status may take upward of twenty years. An experienced torcedor will roll anywhere from 60 to 150 nearly identical cigars a day. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would ever get there to see it actually happen in front of my eyes. The aged Partagás Series 4 Ganselmo selected from his private humidor of rare, vintage smokes was amazing, but the rustic, rolled-up cheroots farmers smoke in the fields as they work are made with tobacco so good it doesn’t leave the farm. I smoked three that day. Put that in your mouth and smoke it!

  Vinales offers a lot more than just tobacco farming, so we decided to stay for a day and a half. Our crew met up with Dago and Omar, a pair of crazy brothers who took us jutia hunting. Jutia are these giant jungle rats that can be skinned and eaten whole, like small pigs. The process was pretty simple. We laid some traps one night, then hit the sack. The next morning, we collected our jutia and headed to lunch at Dago’s friends’ farm on Vinales’s valley floor. We dined on our freshly caught rodents, as well as crayfish as big as my arm from a local river and two massive red snappers, all grilled. We also ate roasted pig, and finished with palmichas, small dates harvested from royal palm trees. I was thankful for my salsa lesson from Nelda, because when a local band showed up to get the party started, I danced up a storm, played a little guitar, and had a good ol’ time with my hosts.

  We’d arranged to stay at a bed-and-breakfast that evening, which was very rustic. We were way out in the country, without electricity or many modern conveniences. I’d anticipated skipping dinner, since it didn’t appear there was much to eat. Instead, we experienced one of the most memorable meals of the trip at a paladar in the woods called, of course, Paladares del Bosque. Toby had dined there once before and swore up and down it was a gem, but we were out in the middle of nowhere and it was 11 at night. We parked our car on a dirt road, then walked through a forested ravine past about a hundred angry barking dogs. Outfitted with a bougainvillea-and-wildflower-covered deck, here was a little house on stilts perched on the side of a mountain. Food in Cuban homes is extraordinary from a visitor’s perspective; it is everything that the restaurants aren’t. We dined on fresh grilled tuna, rice, beans, yucca with garlic mojo, roasted pork, chicken with olives, cucumber and tomato salad straight from the garden—easily the best tomatoes that I have eaten outside of Morocco. Spring tomatoes in Cuba are just beyond words. The chicken was incredible, freshly butchered and simply thrown on the grill with oil and garlic, finished with an olive-spiked tomato Creole sauce. Slow-roasted pork from pigs pulled out of the pen, starved for a couple of days, and then fed more of those rare palm fruits, dates, orange rinds, and coconut husks for days before butchering, made for another sweet and succulent course. This is food the way it should be.

  It seems my show’s ratings spike whenever I’m subjected to some form of bizarre physical ritual. And as long as viewers like it and I find it culturally significant, I’m going to keep doing it. Santería is a system of beliefs that merges the Yoruba religion with Roman Catholic and Native American traditions; it was developed by slaves brought from Africa to work the Caribbean sugar plantations. I grew up in a Jewish household in New York City, so the idea of Santería itself is rather foreign to me. I met up with Gonsalo, a Cuban expat who moved to Miami but returned after a few years. I’m not sure how he swung that, but maybe it has something to do with his status as a Santero, an exalted position in the culture. He is very high up in the Santería food chain, and invited me to the house of a Babalao named Rafael, basically a Santero priest who holds ceremonies in his house. Their goal? To cleanse me of evil spirits so that I could access the spirit world through their saints as I moved through my daily life. I went through the process with eight or nine other locals from the neighborhood who were already Santería practitioners. Since I was the new guy, they took extra care to ensure I received a thorough blessing, saying a couple prayers over me at every opportunity. An essential aspect of Santería involves the use of herbs, roots, flowers, and plants as well as sacrificial birds and other animals. They sacrificed a few pigeons for the first part of the ritual and proceeded to rub them all over my body in order to transfer the evil spirits in me to the bird. Next, they rolled coconut pieces on the floor to ensure that everything was cool (like rolling bones or dice). Once I was clean, they hooked me up with Yarusha, one of the Saints through which you communicate to the other side of the world in the Santería religion.

  Next, they pulled me into another room, where I knelt on the floor. They killed a rooster by slicing open its neck with a ceremonial knife, pouring the blood over my head and letting it drip down my skull into a little cup, threw some feathers in the cup, and wiped my head clean with a special cloth. The whole thing took about forty-five minutes, all done to call and response prayers and ritual drumming. The ceremony concluded with Rafael leading me to the foot of a sacred Saba tree at a park near his house. I laid my bloody clothes and the rag used to wash my head at the tree’s roots, making sure I clutched the tree and said some prayers with him. Rafael explained that I needed to pursue a better relationship with the God of my understanding. He sensed that at one time in my life I was more connected. Tears formed at the corners of my eyes as he spoke, reminding me that it didn’t matter what I believed in as long as it wasn’t me. He was right. About everything. Life is hectic, and the worldly clamors have overtaken mine, to be sure. My spiritual condition is not what it once was. I couldn’t believe how simple and intrinsically caring and tender the whole morn
ing had been, despite the animal sacrifice. Santería for me had always been on par with voodoo. I simply was ignorant and had practiced contempt prior to investigation. Ouch. One of the most wonderful aspects of my life is the ongoing enlightenment I feel every time I experience another world religion or spiritual practice. It makes a day seeing the sights on a tour bus pale in comparison.

  While I’d been a little stressed about going to Cuba for legal reasons, once we arrived, I felt fairly comfortable all the time, save one incident. Our crew traveled five hours to the colonial city of Trinidad, founded by the Spanish in 1514. Hoping to shoot a fishing trip, we discovered that the Marina Trinidad had a handful of state-run boats. Remember, Cubans are prohibited from being on boats at sea. Local fishermen work from tiny rowboats they can only take a few feet offshore. Alternatively, some take old truck tire inner tubes or large blocks of Styrofoam and propel themselves out to sea with flippers, using hand lines to catch giant-size fish. It’s a wonder they have any fishing industry at all here, given the inherent dangers. A small number of captains get variances so that they may take some privileged guests out on the water, but that’s about it.

  Now, I’m not perfect. Never said I was. In fact, I spent a fair amount of my adolescent years bending the law. However, never have I attempted to experiment in human trafficking. That is, until I went to Cuba. We were shooting on a boat, after all, and we needed sound. Our sound girl, Sheyla, was Cuban. She was willing to take the risk, we were willing to take the risk, so we smuggled her on board. The whole thing seems asinine looking back on it. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that despite the amazing beauty, the resilience of the people, their willingness to share their lives with you, the cultural pride, the amazing talent pool of smarts and savvy, you’re in a country with restrictive, horrific rules that prohibit some of the basic privileges we take for granted—like spending time on a boat. For the most part, a big part, I fell in love with Cuba. Everyone here has an incredible level of acceptance and pride for their country, even when it involves restrictions or limitations—yet I could see the happiness in Sheyla’s eyes as she went out on the water for the very first time. Let’s face it: Cuba is in many ways a paradise, but it’s also a prison. The Cubans know it in their heart of hearts, I think, and they see change coming. Fast.

  Anyway, our day played out perfectly. We set out twenty miles offshore to a string of little islands called the Queen’s Gardens, Gardenia de la Reina, which is a set of roughly 400 islands, some no more than an acre in size, sitting just inside the massive reef system that rings the Cuban side of the Caribbean coastline. We dove for lobsters off Callo Coca. We caught mackerel, pouring rum down their gills to put them to sleep before filleting them. We smoked five-year-old vintage Churchill cigars that were actually rolled by the very fellow who used to roll them for Churchill himself. We putt-putted a couple more miles over to Callo Macho and sat in the tree line, surrounded by a score of wild iguanas and a few very curious jutias. We went bone fishing with some fly rods; we feasted on boiled lobster on the beach and had a grand old time, right up until it was time to head back.

  As we headed back to Cuba proper, our engines died, one by one, about five minutes apart. As luck would have it, an unexpected rainstorm blew in as well. So there we were, stranded at sea in the middle of our experiment in human trafficking. A lonely boat on a giant, empty ocean that never looked bigger. I’ve been scared shitless at sea by bad weather, rickety boats, unskilled captains, lack of radios or life jackets, but this was a new level of petrified. What would happen if the police or the navy showed up? Under any other circumstance, there is no one I would have wanted to see more, but in this instance I might have just been asked to leave the country, or worse. Proceed to airport … or a Cuban prison, do not pass go. “Say, Andrew, you brought a Cuban national on board a boat, twenty miles off the coast. Really!?” People just don’t do that. Out of nowhere, a catamaran with some drunken British tourists sailed by and towed us back to the marina before the authorities caught wind of our operation. Thank you, Yarusha, who I am sure was looking out for me.

  We drove that evening to Raul and Rosa’s house, two friends of our Cuban production team. They expected us at noon, and we rolled in at 7 P.M. Rosa prepared a giant crab, some roasted goat, and a grilled snapper dinner, along with her famous tamarind and sugar candies. Raul is an old-world soul, a real campesino, with no need for cash. He is one of those guys who occasionally take a rubber inner tube out into the water fishing for snapper, sea crabs, and lobster in addition to raising goats, selling goat milk, and taking care of his family’s needs by himself. He built his house overlooking the sea and works off the land. In our dog-eat-dog Western world, this type of life might seem too simple, too boring, and way too full of unnecessary challenges. But these were some of the happiest people I had ever met in my life.

  After dinner, they brought me to the Casa del Musica, which is in the Trinidad town center, smack dab in the middle of the perfectly restored and mostly preserved seventeenth-century city. We danced the salsa, listened to live music, and met Pablo, the guy who runs the outdoor nightclub on the steps of the ancient cathedral. There is no better setting for a music club that I have ever seen. This wasn’t a state-run spot designed for tourists; this was the real thing. Great music and dancing in an unpretentious way, designed for locals, attended by them in droves. Clued-in visitors were made to feel welcome. As I said before, there are so few outlets for Cuban citizens; movie theaters are scarce, and people don’t really watch television (few have them), play video games (ditto), or surf the Web (hahahaha). Instead, Cuba as a country goes out at night, listens to music, and dances. They are still excited about most of the simple things the rest of the world has lost sight of, which says more about us than about them.

  And just when I’m all wrapped up in this wonderful culture, just when I’ve forgotten about Cuba’s strained political scene, we spot policemen arresting a man in the country. Which begged the question Why? No one knew and we didn’t ask, but under Cuban law, killing a cow can pack a heavier fine than murder, with cow killers facing between four and twenty-five years in prison, depending on whom you talk to. However, with the country’s strict food rationing, often a desperate farmer is forced to tie cows to the railroad tracks, which they refer to as “cow suicide.” These incidents must be reported to the police. The farmer typically gives the policemen a piece of meat, which helps them look the other way when it comes to writing an angry report. Of course, this process can get rather messy and complicated, so sometimes a farmer will opt to kill the cow in a barn. This is risky, because Cuba’s vultures, notorious for smelling blood miles away, often lead country cops traveling on horseback right to the scene of the crime. Watching the cops aggressively shaking someone down leaves you with a sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach, especially if you come from a society where more beef is thrown away than Cubans eat in an entire lifetime.

  We motored back into Havana and ate lunch at the Sociedad Gastropol—a quasi-state-run, private eating club on the third floor of a decrepit apartment building. The owner, Hector, operates a simple little restaurant in an amazing setting, with a handful of tables inside and eight or nine tables on a balcony overlooking the Malecón and the ocean. We ate plateloads of real Cuban food, from fresh escabeche of snapper and shrimp ceviche, to a ham-and-potato frittata. But the most interesting dish was a massive grilled lobster tail, pounded out between two pieces of wax paper to roughly a half-inch thick. The tails were about two pounds each, simply huge. They marinate the meat overnight in garlic, lime juice, olive oil, and salt and pepper, then grill it over charcoal and serve it with fresh, paper-thin slices of pineapple and local tomatoes. With this incredible fresh food and a classical guitarist playing in the background, it was a perfect last lunch in Havana.

  We spent the rest of the day walking around the Capitolio and the old National Ballet Theater, then headed back to Hotel Nacional for some needed rest. That evening, I sipped on another
virgin mojito and watched the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. Evening plans involved catching yet another meal at a state-run place called El Emperador with Toby. With its close proximity to the Nacional, this restaurant gets a lot of traffic from the international diplomatic and business community. What’s more, years ago, El Emperador was Chilean president Salvador Allende’s favorite restaurant. Castro invited him to the twentieth anniversary of the attack on Moncada Garrison in the summer of 1973. When he returned on what was to be his last trip to Havana, after not being there for twenty years, he remarked to Castro that he was very excited to finally return to El Emperador. At this point, the place had been closed for years. In one of the great Cuban tales the locals love to tell about their dear, beloved Fidel, Castro allegedly made one phone call and declared the restaurant back open. The original kitchen team was reassembled, they spruced up the joint, filled it with food, trained some waiters, and voilà: El Emperador has been up and running ever since. The atmosphere is very cozy, with light provided by candles. I can see why Allende loved the place. In this dimly lit environment, I noticed the guy at our neighboring table chowing down on a very good-looking steak. I already knew beef was on the no-no list, as was selling it or importing it, so I was baffled. And I still can’t understand or explain the lobster rules, so I was perplexed. My friends explained that in high-end, foreigner-driven restaurants, steak is sort of a business within a business. They have some Cuban beef on the menu, but they also bring in some frozen Argentine, Aussie, and Brazilian beef. If you’re an expat living in Havana, or a well-connected Cuban, and you know a chef in a restaurant who is willing to trade, you can get some frozen Australian racks of lamb or an Argentine tenderloin. So you get some high-quality frozen Argentine or Brazilian beef from your chef friend for cash or some other favor, he leaves you an indiscreet bag by your seat as you leave, and then he just offers some black-market suicide cow meat on his menu for the next couple of weeks so the state inspectors don’t see a discrepancy in the ordering. There is an element of this classically Cuban, “one for all and all for one” sense. It’s very entrepreneurial, yet very much an every-man-for-himself kind of deal. This is one of the things that make Cuba charming in the extreme when it comes to trying to find durable or disposable goods. There’s always a way to find a car part or an exotic piece of food. You just need patience and the ability to go at a moment’s notice to fetch what you need, but it’s also a mañana, mañana culture, so you’ve always got lots of time on your hands.