The month I lived on a Cuban ration-style diet:
Cuba Ration stories
July 2, 2007
Living on Cuban Food Ration Isn't Easy
By ANITA SNOW
The Associated Press
For 30 days, I lived on a similar program. I spent less than $17 for a month's sustenance, dropped nine pounds and learned _ like Cubans _ to budget carefully, plan meals ahead, buy only what was necessary and never throw food away.
Most importantly, I realized that like most Americans, I take food for granted, assuming I'll always get what I want when I want it.
Cuba's ration system began in 1962, to guarantee a low-priced basket of basic foods just as the U.S. cut off trade with the island, sparking food shortages. Initially characterized as temporary, the program remained as Cuba struggled to feed its people, turning to the Eastern bloc for most of its food.
Today, Cuba spends $1 billion a year to give the island's 11.2 million citizens a subsidized ration including rice, legumes, potatoes, bread, eggs and a small amount of meat. The government estimates the ration provides a third of the 3,300 calories the average Cuban consumes daily.
The rationed products, which cost consumers about $1.20, would cost more than $58 if purchased at the overpriced Cuban supermarkets for foreigners known as the "shopping," or about $50 at the average U.S. grocery store.
For my project, I allotted myself the same items on the ration, plus an average salary of $16.60 to buy the rest of my food. During June, I ate little animal protein, no dairy products, very little fat, but probably consumed more rice and beans than I had in a year. When I could, I ate fruit and vegetables daily.
Limited in what they can eat, Cubans spend much time thinking about their next meal. I found myself obsessing about food as well. Would I have enough money at the end of the month to buy vegetables? Would all those potatoes make me fat?
Cubans told me the farmers markets were expensive, but I didn't realize just how costly until I lived on their limited plan. A big papaya costs more than a day's wages.
More than half of Cubans have access to some foreign currency, whether from tips from tourists or remittances from abroad. With $50 a month, a family can buy additional cooking oil, pork or even a rare piece of beef at the "shopping."
But the rest of Cubans have to be creative. Neighbors trade and buy and sell rationed products to get what they need. They purchase milk, butter and yogurt sold surreptitiously outside the government bakery. Some engage in petty theft, such as restaurant workers who skim cheese off sandwiches.
I traded someone a pound of squid for six eggs. When I ran out of coffee, I bought rationed coffee from people who preferred extra food.
I learned firsthand how Cuba's tightly woven society ensures that relatives, neighbors, friends, and co-workers always eat. Several Cubans gave me part of their rations, refusing money or food in exchange. A Cuban colleague offered to share her homemade spaghetti lunch. A friend said his family invited the same elderly neighbor to lunch every day for years.
Despite their generosity, Cubans remain anxious about food, especially those who remember the "Special Period" _ wartime-like austerity measures imposed in the early 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed and the island's gross domestic product plunged by 35 percent.
Cubans experienced true hunger during those years, missing many meals, eating very small and unappetizing ones, going months without meat or fresh produce. But the ration ensured no one starved to death.
The crisis eased after 1993 when the government broke up state farms into smaller cooperatives and individual farms, and opened farmers markets where producers could sell crops at unrestricted prices after meeting government production quotas. Cheap meals at workplaces and schools and affordable street food also help.
Still, stereotypes about Cuba's food situation persist. Visitors are often surprised to find a somewhat plump population, and recent government studies show 30 percent of Cuban adults are overweight.
With all the starch on the ration, and high produce costs, it would be easy to gain weight.
With my American phobia of carbohydrates, I gave away most of my four pounds of potatoes early into the month. Without those carbs, and without access to the cheap meals many government workers get, I dropped nine pounds in 30 days.
I marked the end of the month modestly on Sunday with a small dinner for Cuban and foreigner friends, cooking a mixed bean soup with sausages and a tomato base that my late mother loved. I also made corn bread, a watercress salad with tomatoes and avocados and a pumpkin flan.
Today, I return to a modified version of my diet for another month in hopes of losing more weight.
Legumes remain my primary protein source as I add some fish and chicken. I'll stay away from most beef, pork and dairy products, but will now add nonfat yogurt to my diet, along with more fruit and vegetables.
Most importantly, I'll eschew the chocolate bars, microwave popcorn, and potato chips I love.
And I'll try to stop taking food for granted.
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Cuban food project conjures up memories of family, Southern fare
Jun 6, 2007 | Cuba, Havana
By ANITA SNOW – Associated Press – June 06, 2007
HAVANA (AP) _ The fragrant smell of onions and coriander wafting from the bubbling pot of beans on my kitchen stove conjures up the memory of my mother, a Southerner who would have recognized and appreciated many of the humble dishes I am cooking for my study of how and what Cubans eat.
From a poor Virginia family that struggled through the Great Depression and later lived through the rationing of World War II, my mom’s stories of her early life were similar to those Cubans now tell me: struggles, scrimping and saving, wearing hand-me-downs and adding extra water to the pot for one more hungry person at the supper table.
She talked a lot about the food. Steaming plates of black-eyed peas ensured good luck every New Year’s Day. A Christmas ham glazed with pineapple was a rare treat for folks who regularly ate more lima beans than meat.
As I sit at my kitchen table, writing this in a journal while eating my dinner of black beans, rice and steamed spinach, I realize I’m studying not only Cubans’ food, but my own family’s food as well. Much of the simple fare my mom grew up with and loved _ okra, sweet potatoes, ham, bean soups _ is similar to what has nourished Cuban bodies and souls for centuries.
I’m still in my first week of a monthlong project to eat as the Cubans do _ consuming only the types and amounts of food that average Cubans get with their government food ration, plus what they can buy at farmers markets on an average salary.
Compelled under this self-imposed program to buy and prepare my own food _ picking through the dried beans and rice and rinsing them thoroughly before putting them to the flame _ I am reminded that this most basic of all human needs is about more than calories, protein and carbohydrates.
Food, especially when cooked and shared with others, ties us to our families, to our cultures and to humankind in general.
The okra known as quimbobo in Cuban farmers’ markets is the same vegetable brought by African slaves to both this island and the South. It’s the same vegetable my mother ate as a child and tried to make me eat when I was little.
The collard greens my mom enjoyed are similar to the Swiss chard known here as acelga.
Like many Cubans, my mom also grew up ladling thick stews of beans and chunks of vegetables onto her plate from an impossibly large pot on the stove, flavored with a big old ham hock, lots of salt and maybe some bacon if there was a little extra money that week.
Although sweet potatoes in Cuba are white inside rather than the orange more familiar to Americans, my mom would surely have recognized the tuber the islanders call boniatos. Cubans often deep fry them in vegetable oil like russet potatoes or drown them with butter and sugary syrup for a popular dessert known as boniatillo.
That tasty island dish is not so different than the candied sweet potatoes Americans eat on Thanksgiving, but in Cuba there are no little marshmallows to sprinkle on top and melt in the oven.
The women in my mom’s family would have cooked them differently _ boiling, mashing and sweetening them even more before baking the mixture into heavenly sweet potato pie.
All these scents and flavors come back to me more than two years after my mom’s death, from a stroke at age 74.
On my last trip to see her before she died, I made one of mom’s favorite dishes, a traditional Southern-style 10-bean soup, foregoing the ham hock and bacon for my vegetarian sister, but still baking the cornbread that it tastes best with, smothered with honey and sweet butter.
Now I know how I will mark the end of my project. I’ll pass on that juicy steak I first talked about, and instead make a 10-bean soup with all Cuban products _ lentils, black beans, black-eyed peas, garbanzos, red beans, white beans, lima beans and any others I can find to make sure I end up with 10.
I’ll try for cornbread with the corn meal I’ve seen at the farmers’ market near my home. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try baking bread with cassava, the stringy white tuber Cubans know as yuca.
And I’ll invite some good friends to join me _ because food is just fuel if it is not shared.
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Cubans buy street food from on high
June 13, 2007
BY ANITA SNOW
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HAVANA — Cubans may not have McDonald's or Jack in the Box, but they do have pizza in a basket.
Customers shout orders to a terrace kitchen atop a 1930s-era two-story building and the pizza is lowered to the street in a rattan basket.
Pizza Celina is among the more inventive places that Cubans go for street food to augment government food rations. Elsewhere in Havana, self-employed street vendors hawk peanuts, popcorn and a snack known as "chicharrones de macarones" - macaroni pork rinds - made by boiling pasta, drying it in the sun, then frying it.
Near the University of Havana, students line up at lunchtime outside a building with peeling pink paint to shout orders for pizza with tomato sauce and cheese for 8 pesos, which is about 38 cents. A little bit more buys a ham or sausage topping.
Minutes later, a basket on a rope drops for payment. Money collected, the basket comes down again, bearing hot pizzas, grease soaking through butcher-paper wrapping. There is no soda or napkins.
The basket-on-a-rope delivery method is popular among those who share and sell goods in apartment buildings without working elevators.
"We come here because it's good, it's fast and it's cheap," said Laura, a 20-year-old history student. Like many Cubans, she wouldn't give a last name, uncomfortable talking with a foreign reporter about a matter as political as food.
She said she often eats for less money at the university cafeteria, but the food there isn't as good as at the privately run Pizza Celina.
"This is a bit expensive for us, but we come when we can," she said. A recent increase in the monthly government stipend for students, from 20 pesos to 50 pesos (about $1 to $2.50), means she can now afford to visit the pizzeria once a month.
Laura lives on the other side of Havana, and it's impractical to go home to eat.
The only thing close to a fastfood chain in Cuba is the staterun Rapidito or the food counter at Cupet gas stations, which both sell hot dogs and fried chicken that most Cubans cannot afford because the food is priced in the "convertible pesos" used by foreigners.
Government workers are paid in regular pesos, which trade at about 24 to the convertible peso or 21 to the U.S. dollar.
A Rapidito hot dog at 1 convertible peso costs more than a day's pay for a Cuban earning a typical monthly salary of 350 pesos ($16.60).
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And this, from an earlier visit to Cuba before AP opened the bureau in 1999:
Nov. 29, 1992
Cuban Wit Feeds Families in Cash Crisis
By ANITA SNOW
ASSOCIATED PRESS
HAVANA, Cuba (AP) _ Behind the walls of a dilapidated mansion, a family illegally raises a pig in the bathtub for a New Year’s Day feast. To prevent betrayal, its vocal cords have been cut.
“It’s big, but skinny,” said a neighbor, Lucia, grinning as she passed the house in what used to be one of Havana’s elegant neighborhoods. “They don’t think it will last until December.”
As the nation’s economic crisis deepens and the shelves of government stores become barer, Cubans grow more adept at devising ways to feed themselves.
Lucia, a 54-year-old schoolteacher, makes her own wine in a big glass jar with fruit juice, water and yeast.
“It’s not very good, but it’s better than nothing,” she said. Like others, Lucia asked that her last name not be used for fear of government retribution.
A common meat substitute is grapefruit steak, a citrus slice seasoned with salt and pepper and fried.
That is among the preparations Nitza Villapol demonstrates on her television cooking show, “Cocina al Minuto” (Cooking in a Minute). When potatoes were plentiful, all her main dishes use them.
Nearly everyone breaks the law by purchasing stolen or illegally imported food on the thriving black market.
“See those bananas?” Lucia said, pointing to a large, green bunch in her kitchen. “I got those on the black market, and those potatoes and oranges, too.”
Putting food on the table has never been easy in Communist Cuba, where rationing and long lines became a way of life.
But Cubans say it has never been as hard as now, under wartime-like measures known as “the special period in time of peace.” About the only food they can depend on is the ice cream at the popular Coppelia parlors, Cuba’s culinary pride.
After communism collapsed in the Soviet bloc, Cuba lost up to 85% of its former trade, including most imports of processed food and petroleum. Trade is limited further by a 30-year-old U.S. embargo, recently tightened to put political pressure on President Fidel Castro.
Bread, once plentiful, is now rationed--one roll a day per person.
Fresh fruits and vegetables are so scarce that anyone who finds a few bananas or papayas is the object of envy. Canned meat from Russia and fresh chickens and canned vegetables from Bulgaria, once common, have disappeared.
Lighting is dim inside one government food store, built by an American grocery chain before Castro’s revolution in 1959.
“They are saving on petroleum” explained Maria, a woman in her 60s who guided a reporter through several markets.
Instead of aisles, there are six islands where families buy rationed goods: rice, sugar, beans, plastic bags of coffee, eggs, evaporated milk, canned tomatoes, jars of baby food, tubes of toothpaste, bars of gray-green soap.
For each item, the shopper pays a relatively small amount: about $1.50 for five pounds of rice and 65 cents for toothpaste. The woman behind the counter marks off each item in the shopper’s ration book, or “libreta.”
Before the crisis, Cubans could usually get the items listed in their ration books, plus numerous others that were not rationed, Maria said. Now, many rationed items are seldom or never available.
“It is a daily fight to feed your family,” she said.
This day, there is no fresh milk or cheese, no fresh meat except for the hated “picadillo” of 30% ground beef and 70% soybean meal. There is fresh fish, though, and about a dozen people line up for it.
Well-stocked “diplotiendas,” the dollar stores for foreigners and high Communist Party officials, are a sharp contrast to government markets. The largest one rivals any American supermarket, with items ranging from electronics equipment and clothing to fresh, canned and packaged food.
Many Cubans yearn for the return of farmers’ markets, which thrived until the government closed them in 1986 amid complaints that middlemen were making huge profits.