63: Food and padlock

Cuban cooking is monotonous. Our luxurious diet repeats in perpetuity: bread and eggs, fried plantains, some daily vegetable or salad, and pork more often than is healthy. With this diet, we made it through the ‘70s and ‘80s. Then came the almost criminal crisis of the ‘90s, when our diet disappeared but the repressive padlock remained on what we should and could not say.

My parents belonged to a generation that, in most cases, played dumb to survive. In the worst and most common of those cases, they sold their minds and souls to survive under one ideology. Unlike Albert Camus’ Rebel Man, our elders never dared to say “NO,” perhaps because they were forced to say “YES” by a Rebel Army in Revolution.

As in all good literature, my childhood was very poor and very happy. My parents emphasized building a home outside the Revolution and its rushes of patriotic hatred. But they paid a high price for this in silence and a lack of solidarity. Perhaps they were quite alone, I don’t know, as I grew up between them, and all their friends and family left Cuba, never to return.

My house in the abandoned neighborhood of Lawton is made of hundred-year-old wood, at an odd corner where three streets knock into each other and die. Everything there comes from another era, from a pre-industrial universe of colonial farms and naturally prepared foods.