The government looked for ways to rebuild the economy and get past the “special period,” and Cuba decided, as all Caribbean countries eventually do, that tourism was part of the solution. Despite hard times, tourist sites like the Hemingway house were refurbished. (The house was repainted its original cream color instead of the bright white the young revolutionaries had chosen when they took possession.) The government encouraged foreign investments for the first time, though it still had to own at least 51 percent of an enterprise. Hotels were restored. Old mansions were converted into boutique hotels.
Even this very modest introduction of capitalism to the socialist system was a major adjustment for Habaneros. On the one hand, they were being offered an opportunity to improve their situation. On the other, they were being told that government programs were no longer sufficient to look after them. Novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, one of the important chroniclers of this special period, wrote, “We had been locked up in a zoo for thirty-five years. We had been given a little food and medicine but had no idea what it was like out there beyond the bars. And all of a sudden came the switch to the jungle.”
Possession of U.S. dollars, which had been illegal, was legalized. This greatly facilitated small-scale commerce with foreigners, such as with the bicycle taxis. It also infused a famously egalitarian society with an income disparity that often seemed to mock the ideals of the revolution. Almost any job in dollars paid considerably more than any job in pesos. The driver of a taxi could earn more than a college professor, a surgeon, a baseball star, or a top entertainer.
Of course, these being hard times and this being Havana, the new freedom greatly facilitated the reemergence of street scams, such as peddling second-rate “Havana” cigars for high prices, as well as prostitution. Once again, men waited outside the better hotels, ready to offer guests a choice mulata.
As this latter scene reveals, three ambitious goals of the revolution had failed: the elimination of the sex trade, the elimination of sexism, and the elimination of racism.
Revolutionary Cuba had guaranteed its people the rights to birth control, abortion, and divorce for the first time in the island’s history; the Catholic Church was no longer in power. Vilma Espín, one of the original revolutionary combatants, married to Fidel’s brother Raúl Castro, had taken on the issues of sexism and machismo as the leader of the Federation of Cuban Women and the driving force behind the 1975 Family Code, which wrote changes in marriage vows and women’s rights into the legal system. The revolution boasted that it would create “the new man”; in the new marriage vows, grooms had to swear to help with the housework. And they do, but that doesn’t mean that attitudes have completely changed. A government can eliminate job discrimination and give everyone access to medical assistance, but it is harder to change the way people think.
The status of Cuban women post-revolution is revealed in the evolution of Havana restaurants. In 1993, the possibility of legally operating a private restaurant in one’s home—to be a small, simple, homespun affair—was proposed by the government. Even at the outset, this was an opportunity limited to a small number of people, because, given the nature of Havana housing, few families had apartments that would lend themselves to becoming restaurants.
These restaurants were called paladares—a word of uncertain origin. It seems to derive from the Spanish word for “palate,” and as an adjective it means “tasty.” It is often said to have come from the Brazilian soap opera Vale Todo, which aired on Cuban television in the early 1990s; the lead character had a chain of restaurants called Paladar. The name stuck, though the soap opera didn’t.
A paladar served simple, traditional dishes—such as ajiaco, picadillo, and fried plantains in garlic sauce—in a small room, probably the former living room, set up with two or three simple tables, often of the folding, card-playing variety, while children curiously peered out at the customers from the kitchen.
Despite the new marriage vows, the cooking in these home paladares was almost always done by women. These home cooks did not necessarily project the image of housewives, however. In Habana Vieja, the cooking and hosting at La Mulata del Sabor was done by la mulata herself, Justina Sierra. Justina was a former actress of, as the French put it, a certain age, a woman a few sizes larger than the little dress with the plunging neckline that she usually wore while flirting with her male customers, telling them that cooking is “about love.” But also, she was a very good cook.
New laws were passed in 2010 that allowed the paladares to become more sophisticated and ambitious. The kitchen was no longer in view, and children no longer stared out at the customers. The new paladares were housed in larger, better-decorated spaces, sometimes filling the ground floor of a Habana Vieja house or sprawling out into a courtyard. Clearly the definition of “inside a home” had been liberalized. And sometimes ambitions overreached. A paladar in Miramar, with an appealing tropical courtyard setting, served a dish garnished with a glass in which a goldfish was swimming. This posed an interesting question, both morally and gastronomically.
The definition of the paladares’ home cooking, home service—all of it had changed. There were now waiters in black vests and white shirts. The housewife cook was vanishing, replaced by a chef-owner, who was usually a man and sometimes one trained professionally at the hotelier school in Havana. As the status and scale of paladares improved, women were gradually replaced by men.
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The new eating establishments needed to buy fresh food, which takes some ingenuity in Havana. One source was Mercado 19 y B, named for its address in Vedado, which has long been frequented by members of diplomatic households. A well-kept, covered open-air market, it has limited choices, many dependent on the season: fragrant guavas in the winter, many kinds of plantains and bananas all year round, papayas, huge quantities of the juice oranges that used to be exported to the Soviet bloc in exchange for oil, some herbs and onions and garlic, and cachucha peppers, which are small and brilliant red, with only a hint of heat. There is also meat, but open-air markets are dangerous places in which to shop for meat in the tropics. A better choice is the frozen meat available in higher-priced stores in central Havana.
Another food source is the back seats of cars, whose owners drive around legally or illegally with produce to sell. It is impressive how many heads of cauliflower can fit into the back seat of a 1957 Chrysler.
In Miramar—home to well-kept embassies with well-trimmed gardens, and early-twentieth-century houses often art deco in style—fishermen sit by the sea with long poles catching pargo, which they will sell to restaurants. Sometimes they take orders in advance.
Only a few blocks beyond the large, well-groomed Spanish and Chinese embassies on Miramar’s Fifth Avenue is a neighborhood called Atabey, where houses are more middle-class-looking but still well kept. Here, a man who is called Chino—a misnomer, since his real name is Rolando Oye and he is actually Japanese—has an organic farm. Oye worked as a helicopter mechanic until 1997, when he took up his father’s trade. His father, who had been an organic farmer in Japan, immigrated to Cuba in 1935. Organic farming is easier than conventional farming in a country with a scarcity of chemical fertilizers.
Oye grows fragrant herbs—dill, parsley, mustard greens—bursting with tangy flavor, and tiny cherry tomatoes, plantains, and cachucha peppers. He uses his less-than-an-acre plot of land in the crowded capital economically, with brilliant planning, and enriches the soil of this hidden green space with natural compost. His tiny farm is a cooperative with 260 members. Nearby, his sister operates a similar cooperative organic farm.
One of the charms of Havana is that surprising little pockets of activity spring up in unexpected places. In a dilapidated and decaying city, Habaneros have a genius for finding ways of using overlooked or abandoned spaces.
On Calle Mercaderes in Habana Vieja is a restaurant called La Imprenta. It appears to be professional and well run, but it is set among ruins—the courtyard of a 1774 building. In 1905, a print
er had set up a shop called La Habanera on the ground floor, but today the building is roofless and gutted, as are many Havana buildings. Partial walls and second-story stone archways are the restaurant’s decor, along with tall, straight royal palms and other tropical plants. Habaneros are gardeners. They plant anywhere they have a space—on their balconies, in their apartments, in courtyards, in yards. Beautiful plants grow easily here and are a reminder that if people gave up gardening, lush tropics would overtake spaces very quickly.
Julio Garcia, a good-looking, burly black man, beefy in a city of lean men, is a waiter at La Imprenta, but he moonlights as a magazine food writer. This is not unusual. A by-product of a system that tries to provide everyone with a good education is that seemingly everyone has high ambitions. In April 1996, Castro commented, “Everybody wants to be an intellectual in this country. This is a vice created by the Revolution itself, by the universities.”
Since the government opened up the possibility of earning dollars, however, Havana has also seen the reverse occurring, with professors and engineers eager to drive taxis.
Garcia describes the chicken stew at La Imprenta as an authentic peasant dish. “Real Cuban food is slave food. It is not European,” he told me. And as with many popular dishes, this seems to be the case. Here is La Imprenta’s recipe, in Garcia’s words. (My comments are in parentheses.)
Kill the chicken.
Pluck it and clean it.
Chop it in pieces with the same machete used to kill it. Put it in a pot with a little water (enough water to cover, adding four big pinches of salt, two bay leaves, and three large pieces of carrot), cook for a while (about seventy minutes) and remove bone (and skin).
Add small amount (one quarter cup) of oil, normal oil not olive oil (many Habaneros do use olive oil, usually Spanish, when available, though this is not the way of the true guajiro, the Cuban peasant) to a skillet, chopped onion (one onion thinly sliced is better than chopped) and garlic (five medium-size cloves, sliced). (Add onions and garlic to hot oil until wilted.) Add chicken meat and a lot of (two and a half cups of good, chunky) tomato sauce. (Add about a half-cup of the stock from the chicken pot.) Add salt (not necessary if stock is well salted) and black pepper (six good turns of mill). Cook for an hour or more, until you are ready to eat.
Garcia said that in the old days, they added potatoes also. But potatoes, which were never a staple crop in Cuba, are scarce in Havana. The state-owned farms stopped producing them, possibly because of low nutritional value; the government was very health-conscious. Instead you could add about seven disks of peeled yuca, sliced a third of an inch thick. You should have a pot of good chicken stock left over, and pureed black beans could simmer in this for fifteen minutes for a classic black bean soup, or you could simmer more pieces of yuca in the stock, then puree it and add milk and have yuca soup.
La Imprenta is only one of many new restaurants to appear in Havana in the twenty-first century. El Templete, not to be confused with a nearby monument of the same name, is a state-owned restaurant, but unlike earlier ones that relied on Russian restaurant expertise, it has developed with the input of Spaniards. The original manager of El Templete, in 2005, was a Basque who introduced traditional Basque dishes, such as peppers stuffed with salt cod and a fisherman’s stew called marmitako. Then came a Catalan and then a Malagueño. With all these Iberian layers, the restaurant offers far better seafood fare than Habaneros have seen in a long time; seafood here used to mean either grilled lobster or badly fried pargo.
Before the revolution, affluent families would pass leisurely Sundays at the yacht club in Miramar or a beach house in Pinar del Río. On the way home they would stop off at a farm in the tobacco country west of Havana, by the hilly town of Guanajay, where there was a family restaurant called the Rancho Luna. The restaurant would take family photos, print them, and place them in cardboard frames that said RANCHO LUNA, for diners to take home as souvenirs. The restaurant closed in 1963, but the owners, the Garcias, stayed in Cuba and, with state financing, opened El Aljibe in Miramar on August 13, 1993, a waitress there told me—“That’s Fidel’s birthday,” she added in a hushed, reverent voice.
A re-creation of its predecessor, El Aljibe has a thatched roof, tile floors, big tables, and stiff Spanish wood-and-leather chairs, and serves many of the old restaurant’s favorites, like Pollo a lo Tinguaro, named after a sugar mill near Camagüey. This dish, chicken cooked with sour oranges, is a Havana staple.
The sour orange—naranja agria—is an orange-fleshed, green-skinned citrus fruit. Basic to Cuban cooking, they are hard to find elsewhere. A workable substitute is lemon juice mixed with orange juice. The trick is to create a taste like an orange but sour as a lemon.
Here is the Garcia recipe for Pollo a lo Tinguaro at El Aljibe (for four servings):
3 pounds of chicken
A pinch of salt
A pinch of ground black pepper
½ cup sour orange juice
½ cup flour
½ cup oil
5 thin slices of ham
1 slice bacon
1 slice long crusty Cuban bread (pan de flauta)
(The Garcias also use onions and garlic in their recipe, but they seem to have forgotten to list it under the above ingredients. I suggest a sliced half onion and five chopped garlic cloves.)
Cut up the chicken into eight pieces and season with salt, pepper, and orange juice. Let it rest for a half hour and then dust with flour. Fry (in the oil) the slices of ham with bacon and fry separately the slice of bread. Let them drain and run them through a grinder. Fry the chicken in the same skillet and once it is golden, add chopped garlic and onion. When it is almost done add the ham-and-bacon mixture and finish.
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In the past few decades, the Cubans have been rebuilding their tourist industry—without Americans. At what is remembered as the height of Cuban tourism, the record year of 1957, the island attracted 304,711 tourists. After the revolution, when tourism was discouraged and there were few visitors, that number dropped precipitously, to only 8,400 in 1974. But in 1990, as the special period was about to begin, the 1957 record was surpassed, and by 1994 there were 619,000 tourists. Even with only a few visiting Americans, and with the embargo still in place, Cuba, and especially Havana, has been seeing the largest number of tourists it has witnessed in its long history of tourism. Since 2010, Cuba has been hosting more than a million visitors a year.
Shops and boutiques, which had completely disappeared from Havana after the revolution, have opened again, often in traditional shopping areas like Calle Obispo. Here, the names of some of the fashionable shops from a bygone era still have their names spelled out in mosaic on the crumbling sidewalks in front of their old entrances.
Ceramics are back. This was a traditional Cuban craft, derived from Andalusian tilemaking. By the twentieth century, many types of objects were being made from ceramics, but after the revolution, ceramic making was stopped because of the tremendous amount of energy consumed by kilns. Yet in one of the contradictions that abound in this revolutionary society, summer programs for the children of good revolutionaries on the Isla de Juventud taught ceramic making. Those revolutionary youths have since grown up and are making ceramics—tiles, plates, and bowls with Cuban themes, and even statues embellished with political satire. One sculpture depicts Obama and Raúl Castro standing on the Cuban people.
Most of the new hotels are refurbished old hotels or large mansions turned into boutique hotels. In the mid-1990s, there was considerable controversy about the government financing the construction of a huge seventy-million-dollar hotel on the Malecón next to Meyer Lansky’s dream high-rise hotel casino, the Habana Riviera. In twenty years, the government had gone from using a high-rise hotel as a dormitory for party followers to building a new one in the same neighborhood for tourists.
After having escaped the fate of other seaside cities blocked off from the ocean by its own wall of high-rise hotels, was Havana finally going to succumb?
And why was money that was badly needed for restoration being diverted to such a project? The obvious reason is that the economy was counting on more tourists, and there were not enough hotel rooms for them. But revolutionary Cuba was supposed to be different, and such money-based pragmatism was, and still is, unpopular. So far, this avenue has not been greatly pursued, but the future is uncertain.
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In the onrush of tourism, what has happened to the old standbys? La Bodeguita del Medio is crowded every night with musicians playing the old songs, mostly boleros of love and heartache. Sometimes the group includes a tresero, who plays a uniquely Cuban instrument called the tres, a six-string guitar with three sets of double strings, often tuned in octaves. It was developed for that most Habanero musical form, the Afro-Cuban son.
Many in the crowd are young European males who have enjoyed too many mojitos and generally do not succeed in their pursuit of beautiful young Habaneras. Foreign men are unhinged by the way Habaneras do not look away when ogled. As Edmundo Desnoes wrote, “What is really extraordinary about Cuban women is that they always look you in the eyes: they never avoid being touched by your eyes or touching you with theirs.” But this is often followed by a rejection delivered with a slightly ironic politeness that is also Habanero.
For centuries, foreign visitors have remarked on the unfailing politeness and warmth with which the people of Havana greet foreigners. They do not even exhibit hostility toward the Americans whose government tried for decades to starve them.
Over at El Floridita, there is a four-piece Cuban combo with maracas, also playing son. The band plays down at the end of the bar that has become a shrine to Hemingway, with photos, including the fishing one with Fidel, and a bust of the author. It looks like the kind of shrine to a chosen African spirit that you would find in a Havana home. If you were going to build a shrine to Hemingway, it would make sense to put it in a bar.
Standing at the bar where he liked to stand is a literally larger-than-life—but maybe he always appeared to be larger than life—bronze statue of Hemingway; he will forever be drinking at El Floridita. There are young people, beautiful of course, dancing, incredibly of course, to the music, and smoking. Fidel may have given up smoking in 1985, but hardly anyone else did. Papa, slightly larger than everyone else, is wearing the kind of stupid gee-I’m-so-happy-to-be-here smile you never see in any of his many photographs, not even the phony-looking ones. The young women are dancing around him, shaking their hips and completely ignoring him, and he is standing there looking at them with his silly smile. It is not a completely unbelievable scene.
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