|
|
|
The
Coppelia ice cream parlor in Havana is considered "The
Revolution's gift to the people." Like most
gifts, it comes with some strings attached, including
this seventeen point list of rights and responsibilities
of the ice cream eater.The sign is posted at each
Coppelia entrance.
|
For
my dissertation, I will undertake an anthropological study
that seeks to explain why Cubans eat as they do in the
contemporary period. Through ethnographic research in a
handful of institutional and private sites, I seek to better
understand how and why the socialist state influences Cuban
foodways, and how citizens respond to state influence as
they go about the everyday practices of growing, buying,
cooking, and eating food. The interaction between the Cuban
state and its citizens will be set within a transnational
context in which new foods and foodways--including fast
food, snack food, ethnic and tourist restaurants, supermarkets,
imported food and processed food--are sweeping Latin America
and the Caribbean. Funding provided by the Center for Latin
American Studies allowed me to travel to Havana in June
of 2000 to conduct preliminary research on these topics,
as well as to make the institutional affiliations that
are a necessary part of conducting research in Cuba. The
following report contains some observations I was able
to make as a result of my summer research, along with future
directions for research that my work this summer suggests.
Cultural
historians, many of them Cuban, have come up with a consistent
and reliable story of Cuban cuisine, one that takes food
as a concrete representation of the mescla--or mixture--that
characterizes the island. Nitza Villapol, a Cuban culinary
expert who had a weekly television program about food before
her death in the late 1990s, describes a process in which
each wave of people to wash over the island brought with
them one or two food items that over time became part of
what in the current day can be called Cuban cuisine. First
the Spanish colonists brought garbanzo beans to a native
population already consuming starchy malanga and pork.
Then African slaves imported okra and plantains, and later
Chinese laborers brought the now ubiquitous rice. The trajectory
of a food item can be complex, as in the case of the potato
which originated in the New World but had to be brought
back to France and spread into Spain before it reached
Cuba in the 19th century. Though most foods can be accounted
for in this fashion, some culinary mysteries remain: to
my knowledge cultural historians haven't explained why
island-dwelling Cubans don't eat fish and why in contrast
to other Latin American nations hardly spice their food
at all.
What
all accounts of Cuban cuisine share is the sense that this
process of culinary change through intermixture has stopped.
Like most people, Cubans consider themselves in possession
of a cuisine that one can follow or deviate from in making
and taking ones daily bread, but the cuisine itself is
a constant, even ossified part of authentic Cuban culture.
This ultimately arbitrary bracketing off of particular
foods and foodways and labeling them part of a fixed and
somehow authentic Cuban culture is what anthropologists
Hobsbawm and Ranger have described as the "Invention of
Tradition". An interesting anthropological project, when
one comes across an Invented Tradition--which is any tradition,
in Hobsbawm and Ranger's view--is to ask what falls outside
what is taken to be traditional and why. What foods and
food habits are common enough that they might legitimately
be included under the rubric of Cuban cuisine, but are
not, and what is gained by not doing so? For instance,
historical anthropologist Shannon Dawdy writes of an interaction
with a woman in the countryside, who had just served Dawdy
an African-inspired stew of chicken, tomatoes, and rice; "I
ask her what her favorite foods are. She says peach jam,
which is hard to find now, also a kind of yellow cheese
that came in a box (two American imports)." I discovered
a similar enthusiasm for processed and imported foods in
Havana. Why not look at these foods as part of contemporary
Cuban cuisine? Why not look at it as the (perhaps dubious)
culinary contribution of the American colonizers of the
last two centuries? Because, like most peoples, Cubans
use cuisine to tell a very particular story of their island,
one that has made peace with Spanish colonization but not
North American.
A
more likely candidate for inclusion in Cuban cuisine is
soy. The Revolutionary government began production of soyfoods,
mainly in the form of yogurt and a crumbly meat extender,
in the early 1990s, in the midst of a hunger crisis brought
on by the collapse of communist states (Cuba's primary
trading partners) in the east. Though the crisis has abated,
today soy is widely consumed in Cuba and on the level of
signification is quickly losing its connotations of foreigness.
If this nutritional powerhouse fails to find a place as
the socialist contribution to authentic Cuban cuisine,
again it will be interesting to consider why.
Ironically,
the other main socialist contribution to Cuban cuisine
has been a luxury item, ice cream. In the center of every
major Cuban city, the state has constructed an ice cream
parlor under the name of Coppelia. The Coppelia in Havana
is an enormous, spider shaped building surrounded by long
lines of Cubans on hot days. "There is no ice-cream place
like this in the world," one official says. "This was a
gift to the people from the revolution." The Coppelia was
a response to the racially segregated ice cream parlors
that existed before the Revolution, and also served as
a challenge to the neighbors to the North--in the early
1960s Castro boasted that the Coppelia would serve 29 flavors,
one more than Baskin Robbins did. In keeping with the realities
of the Cuban economic situation, actually only one or two
flavors are available on a given day, a situation made
light of in the classic Cuban film "Strawberry and Chocolate." On
some days, icy, weakly-flavored Veradero ice creams are
substituted by the high quality, higher-cost ice cream
manufactured by Coppelia. Interestingly, dollar ice cream
shops originally intended for tourists are now crowded
with dollar earning Cubans, too, another sort of segregation--economic--threatens
to take hold of Cuban society again.
How
Cubans get the food they eat is determined largely by access
to dollars. As a result of my work this summer, I began
to understand the complex system of food procurement in
Havana, in which rationed food is supplemented by food
bought at farmers markets, at hard currency stores, and
on the black market, as well as by food sent by family
members in the countryside. Personal relationships, especially
kinship, play an important role in the networks of food
exchange, and in addition to access to dollars, determines
the quality of food a family eats.
 |
|
Researcher
Suzanne Wilson and friend Raul wait a long time in
a long line to hear music in Havana.
|
In
Havana I also discovered how the foodways of a number of
small subcultures within Cuba--including orthodox Jews
and Chino-Cubans--differ both from that of mainstream Cubans
and that of Jews or Chinese in the US. For example, few
Cuban Jews keep Kosher. The director of a Jewish-support
organization in Oakland knows only one woman on the island
who does, and speaks of taking temple leaders to a dinner
at which all ordered lobster (in violation of the laws
of Kashrut). Cuban Jews have access to a kosher butcher
shop, but keep its existence secret from other Cubans to
avoid resentment, since meat is sometimes scarce and highly
coveted in Havana.
Lastly,
a mundane but critical accomplishment of this summer's
trip was arranging institutional affiliations to support
my work. In Havana I met with scholars at the Centro de
Antropologia in Havana and the Centro de Investigacion
y Desarrollo de la Cultura Cubana Juan Marinello. I requested
formal position to conduct my research there and made arrangements
for visas, housing and the like. The trip was highly successful
and the financial assistance from the Center for Latin
American Studies was much appreciated.
Suzanne
Wilson is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology
