Sugar! In Cuba, We Make Magic with the Bare Minimum
HAVANA TIMES – A friend is visiting me and makes a comment while laughing. We’ve gotten used to laughing at everything, even when it’s not exactly funny. She had sweetened her coffee with what she thought was “raspadura” (processed sugarcane juice molasses) because she didn’t have any regular sugar. Amazingly, sugar is very expensive and just as scarce in this land of sugarcane.
But once she served the coffee to her father, he remarked, “It tastes like sweet potato.” That’s when she realized that the bar of raspadura she had bought for the coffee was made from sweet potato, not just cane juice (guarapo) as it should have been. We laughed, and I laughed too.
I gave her another recipe to sweeten what we need, one the neighbor kindly shared with me: make sugar from the same guarapo sugarcane juice. It’s more reliable. You put the guarapo on the stove until it reduces and becomes a syrup. You store it in any container, preferably glass, and now you have something to sweeten with. Mainly for that coffee, which is something we can’t do without in the mornings, and for many, at all hours of the day. My friend agreed and said she’d definitely try that.
The problem isn’t just with sugar. It’s with everything. We live in a country so deeply damaged by never-ending crises, by the pressure of a war-like mentality in power, by the helplessness of trying to build a “normal” life, that we are increasingly convinced that Cuba is not a country, it’s a concentration camp where humans are experimented on to see what they can do in extreme conditions.
And of course, to survive (we know life is something else entirely), you have to make do with the bare minimum. You must learn to negotiate with both dark and light forces. You work magic. And every day we wonder how it is we manage to work, study, go out to do business, connect with family and friends… because under the conditions we frequently face, no electricity, no water, scarce food, bureaucratic mechanisms that don’t work for anything, and the only way to get things done is through corruption, how can we possibly survive amid so many challenges?
It’s true that thousands of us collapse daily. Among those who suffer from nerves, psychiatric consultations and hospitals have a significant population. There are those who commit suicide, and then there are the burnt-out ones, who don’t go to doctors or hospitals but suffer from total apathy and disconnection from everything. They just don’t care anymore. We won’t even mention those who flee to any place they can, using the money from selling their homes, cars, and all their belongings. The bridges are burned because life itself is more important than the bridges.
Amid all this horror, humor has been one of those valuable resources to endure such madness. But to what extent can this help us keep enduring so much injustice towards ourselves? If it were true that humor could help us in all circumstances despite everything, another question arises: to what extent is it worth laughing at everything while digging our own graves?
In the meantime, until we find the answers, we have no choice but to keep working our magic. Until we can rise and rebuild a better destiny, I believe.