Luncheon Meat Is Here!

Nonardo Perea

HAVANA TIMES — It was still morning when one of my neighbors came announcing that luncheon meat had arrived at the butchers. It’s custom here that somebody always notifies the rest of us about what has arrived at the bodega stores (where they sell rationed items).

It’s the end of the month, and of course because it’s coming to an end, people don´t have a lot of food left, and are waiting for whatever comes in so they go and buy it straight away.

Many people with little means survive on what the government sends to these establishments, as these products cost the bare minimum. However, when talking about prices, the quality of these food products catches my attention, which isn’t always ideal. And there isn’t a lot of them in quantity neither.

The slice of luncheon meat that I got was slimy and had green patches. I stick it in a pan and brush it down to get rid of all of this and then I fry it in really hot oil. An old lady told me once, when we were talking about this damn meat, that even the dogs wouldn´t eat it.

The person in charge of selling this product could only tell us that there wasn’t anywhere to refrigerate it, and that it was the heat that made it like this.

However, this isn’t the first time that something like this has happened, the same thing has also happened with soy mince which almost always has a bad smell, and this is just because it isn’t kept cold enough.

At the end of the day, those done wrong are none other than ordinary Cubans, who have to worry about solving these problems. I’m sure that those who give us this, as if we were scavengers, would never stick a piece of this disgusting luncheon meat in their mouths.