Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (33 page)

Other household necessities are allotted by family: each family can buy one bar of soap every two months and one bottle of dish soap every four months, and a family of two adults and two children can buy one tube of toothpaste each month. Cubans with medical conditions have greater ration allowances. Cubans who are HIV-positive have free food rations and medications, for instance.

Cubans will tell you that these rations last for just a small portion of the month. Most food is bought at much greater expense at farmers’ markets or at urban organic farms.

On my first trip to Cuba in 2007 with Canadian agricultural expert Wendy Holm, she had arranged a visit to a ration store as part of our itinerary as we passed through the central Cuban city of Camagüey.
²⁴
Inside the store, a good-looking man in a new polo shirt and pressed
khaki pants sat at a desk tucked inside a street-level entrance in a ramshackle building. Behind him were a number of hand-drawn signs: “Cigarettes will not be sold to minors,” the noticed read. “Abusive language will not be tolerated.” There were a few dozen dinner rolls in the front display case, but everything else was kept out of sight. Only sample items were displayed with hand-written tags identifying the price. It was about as high-tech as a lemonade stand, but in a strange way, that seemed entirely appropriate. No one was going to “impulse shop,” and brands of cooking oil didn't have to dazzle to compete with other brands. The ration store was really just a neighborhood distribution hub for a few basic items, none of which were particularly of good quality or exciting. To dress up the shop might have even been a bit insulting. (Many Cubans I spoke to complained bitterly about the low quality of the rationed food).

The store was small, and I felt uneasy just looking around. It wasn't just that there was not much to look at; I knew the clerk was aware of how pathetic the selection must seem to a foreigner. We were both uncomfortable about the situation, so I asked if I could snap a picture. He shrugged acceptance. I took a quick photo. After I left, it struck me that the ration store was the closest thing I saw to a grocery store the entire visit to Cuba.

F
ARMERS
’ M
ARKETS

In 1994, farmers’ markets were officially legalized in Cuba, in a further attempt to spur food production and lower prices for people.
²⁵
These began as state-sanctioned farmers’ markets where state farms could sell any surplus produce, but the quality of the goods was so low that soon Cuba had to authorize another type of farmers’ market that operated unregulated by the state and simply by the laws of supply and demand. There are still state-run farmers’ markets, just as there are state-run farms in Cuba, but they are generally associated with lower-quality food items, though the farmers who work on these farms are trying to change the image that Cubans have of their products.

I visited a state-run farmers’ market in 2007, and it was truly an uninspired affair. People will shop there because the prices are regulated by the state, and so prices are often lower—as is the quality. The vendors don't “hustle” their products, and the little kiosks are rundown and smack of Soviet-style severity.

The more popular, and much more common, free-market farmers’ markets in Cuba are not all that different from those in North America except in a few ways. First is the eye-popping abundance and variety of tropical fruit. At the bustling Agromercado 19 y B (named as such because it's on the corner of roads 19 and B) in Havana, I bought a mamey fruit, an ultra-sweet and soft tropical tree fruit the size and shape
of a large, fat mango.
²⁶
From its rough brown exterior, I could have never guessed at the tooth-ringing sweet white pulp inside, with a flavor and consistency that I can only describe as a cross between cooked sweet potato and a very sugary avocado. But the market offered a selection from multicolored habanero peppers (not the ultra-fiery ones, since Cubans have a near-total aversion to even the mildest heat in their food) to daikon radishes, bok choy, parsley, bananas, long green beans, tomatoes, onions, limes, sweet peppers, and potatoes, among other foods.

Most North Americans and Europeans would bristle at the sight of the meat section at a Cuban farmers’ market. Giant carcasses of beef and pork are splayed on open-air countertops, and usually a strong man with a big, not-the-cleanest machete hacks off cuts of meat and hands them to customers as they order. (In Cuba, you also need to bring your own plastic bag or container for whatever you are going to buy, meat included.) More than once, I saw raw chicken thighs and even whole, raw, plucked and cleaned chickens strapped down by bungee cords on the newspaper rack of a bicycle as a person left the farmers’ market. It explained why meat in Cuba was almost always stewed or deep-fried.

If you are buying food at a farmers’ market as a foreign visitor—and it remained unclear even to me as to whether this was “allowed”—you will pay in CUC, the Cuban convertible peso, not in national currency. In that sense, Cuban farmers’ markets are not entirely on the free-market system, but knowing what Cubans make and how much they spend on food purchases, it needn't be.

Lastly, farmers’ markets are noisy affairs in Cuba. Sellers call out their products to the shoppers. Some burst into song or do bird calls. But the energy and vibrancy that is on display on the morning trip to a farmers’ market in Cuba is intoxicating. You just don't get that pushing a cart up the aisle at the grocery store in Canada or the United States.

T
ITO
N
UÑEZ
: T
HE
R
EVOLUTION
WITHIN THE
R
EVOLUTION

The best meal I experienced in Cuba was one I didn't even eat. The same day that I was able to tour the famous Vivero Alamar
organopónico
in Havana, a few of my colleagues from the VIII Meeting on Organic and Sustainable Agriculture 2010 conference went to Las Terrazas and visited the country's leading chef in the sustainable food movement ecorestaurant, Tito Nuñez.

Las Terrazas is an eco-resort village thirty-one miles (fifty-one kilometers) outside of Havana. The area was deforested by colonial coffee plantation owners (or rather by their slaves) during the brief but impactful French colonization of Cuba from 1791 to 1809. Las Terrazas was finally
reforested and restored in the late 1960s. Over six million trees were reestablished there and a small eco-village was built. In 1986, Las Terrazas became a 12,355-acre (5,000-hectare) UNESCO Biosphere Preserve, and now it's a major internal and foreign tourism draw for its hiking trails, swimming, lush natural environment, and biodiversity. It is also the headquarters from which chef Tito Nuñez is slowly creating a revolution within a revolution. Nuñez, one of Cuba's few vegans, runs a small thirty-six-seat eco-restaurant called El Romero (The Rosemary) at Hotel Moka.

Because a number from our group couldn't visit his restaurant in person, Nuñez came to Havana. He is a small-framed, monkish man with shorn hair. He also has the patience of a monk. Nuñez became a vegetarian for health and ethical reasons, and for two decades he has been patiently and slowly converting people, one meal at a time.
²⁷

The restaurant's motto is “so that the cows, the chickens, the lobsters, the jutias [small Caribbean goats], the billy-goats and the fish may live.” He is also a member of Slow Food International—one of the few members in Cuba. He's also deeply concerned about the health of the Cuban people, who are now suffering from the same chronic dietrelated diseases that are at epidemic levels at home in North America. It was his own poor health as a child and young man that led him to vegetarianism, and it was as lonely a path then in Cuba as it is now.

Nuñez showed slides of his eco-restaurant and the 1,076 square feet (100 square meters) of botanical and food gardens that supply his restaurant with 70 percent of the food he uses. The restaurant uses other sustainable technology such as a solar water heater to supply the dishwasher and solar cookers and wood-fired ovens to cook the food. His commitment to the environment goes beyond just onsite gardens and vegetable-and fruit-based foods. At El Romero, the staff pack the takeaway items in banana leaves; the menus are made from recycled paper and tied with natural fiber; drinking straws are hollow plant stems; the wine buckets are sewn from palm leaves; and onsite beehives provide the sweetener used at the restaurant.

In addition to the Eden-like setting for his restaurant, Nuñez's technical skill was evident as he flipped through the slides of the dishes. The food presentation at his restaurant outstripped anything I'd seen in Cuba, ever. (He was trained as an industrial engineer, and his precise mathematical brain obviously informs his cooking. “What a painter does with colors,” he told me, “I do with flavors.”)

The food looked fresh, vibrant, packed with flavor, and completely original.

Despite Nuñez's seeming ease with this type of cooking, the vegetarians at the conference had a terrible time getting a palatable meal or even adequate calories, whether at the premium Hotel Nacional Havana or anywhere on our travels. The concept confused every restaurant chef we came across in Cuba. Rather than just put together some black beans, rice, plantains, and vegetables, they would invariably panic and produce horribly misguided vegetarian “creations,” such as mounds of flavorless steamed carrots or overcooked green beans. Nuñez admitted that his crusade for healthier, more sustainable, and ethical food choices has been a tough sell to the majority of Cubans.

“This is a cultural problem,” Nuñez offered by way of explanation.
²⁸
Cubans want to eat only “meat, refined grains, and rum.” But if anyone can convert committed carnivores, Nuñez and his staff seem to be in a good position to do so with a sixty-six-item menu, all of which looks like edible art.

L
ESSONS FROM
C
UBA

In Cuba, I saw some of the most impressive ecologically integrated farms in all of my travels. Both trips were dizzying experiences of how “high-tech-low-tech” devices and systems could be put into use with a little ingenuity. Osvaldo Franchi-Alfaro Roque on his farm La Joya just outside of Havana proudly showed off his ingenious irrigation timer that
made use of large soda bottles, recycled hospital IV tubing, a regulator valve, and a swiveling cradle. The irrigation timer was for the seedlings in his fruit-tree nursery. Other farmers fashioned handmade hulling and husking machines from automotive and farm equipment parts. After just two weeks in Cuba, it was hard to return to the sheer waste that is North American consumerism.

I was struck by the changes that took place between my visits in 2007 and 2010, especially because of the transition of power between Fidel Castro and his younger brother, Raúl. Cuba seemed to be moving more toward socialism while distancing itself from communism. The austerity that I witnessed in 2007 looked like it was easing somewhat. By 2010, the free-market concessions and Cuba's oil-for-doctors arrangement with Venezuela were clearly making an impact. People had better and more stylish clothing. Cubans seemed generally more affluent (though that sounds a bit strange, given their relative lack of disposable income). There were more cars on the roads and fewer donkey carts. Fewer hitchhikers were on the highways. (It is illegal for a Cuban vehicle to not pick up a Cuban hitchhiker at approved highway hitchhiking areas, which are manned with official hitchhiking organizers to coordinate the flow of transportation.) I even saw a few tractors being resurrected on farms in 2010, something that was unthinkable even a few years ago.

There were a few constants, as well. The Cubans I spoke with in 2007 and in 2010 universally hoped for an end to the US embargo but feared the change that a more consumer-oriented culture would have on their quality of life. The farmers I spoke with, however, were convinced that a return to industrial agriculture would not be tolerated, either by the state or by the people of Cuba. The lessons of the early 1990s were still too painfully close. Instead, Cubans were excited about the innovations they were working toward in permaculture; that is, in designing agricultural systems that integrate with living spaces in a way that resembles bountiful, regenerative natural systems. And they were excited
about integrating alternative energy such as solar and biogas into the agricultural landscape.