Elliot Wilson

City Life | 5 September 2009

After 50 years of communist gristle, no wonder old Fidel’s guts are playing up

After 50 years of communist gristle, no wonder old Fidel’s guts are playing up

There’s a degree of natural justice in the fact that Fidel Castro had to cede power to his brother Raúl last year because of serious gastro-intestinal problems. Put bluntly, after 50 years of Castro communism, Cuban cuisine is absolutely revolting. It’s rumoured that barely a thousand head of cattle remain on the island — down from several million pre-Fidel — and that gristly offcuts of beef and mutton are imported from Venezuela, Costa Rica and even the US. Restaurants come in two grades: cheap, cheerful and awful; or pricey, miserable and awful. Roadside fare is worse: plates of malodorous rice and the occasional limp vegetable washed down with impenetrable ‘meat sauce’. The Comedor de Aguiar, the grandest restaurant in the grandest hotel, the Nacional, is little better; and if the fish doesn’t kill you at El Floridita, the prices will. But the booby prize must go to Ernest Hemingway’s old watering hole, the beautifully preserved Bodeguita del Medio. Battle your way past hordes of American and German tourists and you reach a dim restaurant with a menu promising a special of ‘rice with peas’. That’s not much to show for five decades of continual revolution.

What really sets Cuba apart from other Caribbean nations — indeed, from almost everywhere except North Korea — is the absence of commerciality. Local TV channels blare out 1980s American sitcoms (Miami Vice and The Golden Girls are particular favourites) uninterrupted by ad breaks. Nor are there any advertisements on Havana’s streets. Buses, bus stops, taxis, even shopfronts: all are blissfully free of the commercial clutter that sullies the cities of the capitalist world. The experience is oddly refreshing.

Indeed, there’s a wonderful throwback feeling that pervades the whole of this municipality that’s falling apart at the seams.

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