How Do You Eat That?

By Lien Estrada

HAVANA TIMES – In the morning my aunt came back from the ration store with some products she’d bought for the day’s meal. Among them was something that hadn’t been available for a while: syrup. That thick liquid that, with just a little poured into a glass and some water added (some kinds don’t need sugar because they already have it), turns into a pleasant drink, a relief from the often unbearable heat of our climate.

As with most things, there’s the kind you’re grateful for, the kind you’re less grateful for, and the kind you’re not grateful for at all. The worst is that bitter one that burns down your throat and tastes like the most unpleasant poison—you can be sure you won’t repeat the experience if you can help it.

My aunt put a beer bottle—reused to hold the syrup—on the table and said: “I only bought one to try it. If it’s good, we’ll buy the rest. They’re selling four per ration card.” That card is the control system for the sale of products assigned by the government to Cuban families on the Island; it’s been the backbone of our basic food basket for decades. As soon as my aunt finished speaking and set the bottle on the table, I thought of that memorable passage from George Orwell’s 1984.

In one of the protagonists’ meetings, the woman brings a series of food products—the most basic ones—but she says something like (if I recall correctly): “These are the real ones.” Meaning, they had that quality everyone desired, but only the ruling caste, the bosses, could enjoy them. The rest—the proles, and even the people serving the apparatus that safeguarded that superior caste—had no access to such products.

I know perfectly well that this syrup, those awful blood sausages sold in the markets—practically inedible, yet somehow never withdrawn from sale no matter how absurd that seems—the so-called “meat mass,” a kind of ground mincemeat product sold a lot in Camagüey that I couldn’t bring myself to eat once it was cooked for my lunch (and neither could my cat when I gave it to her), those croquettes, those “medallions” made from the same utterly tasteless croquette paste… and an endless list of very, very bad foods—none of these will ever be eaten by the island’s ruling class, nor by the few others who can escape the constant challenge of “what are we going to eat?”

I remember a delicious ham I was once offered at home, “like the ones from before” (that’s what we say when something tastes good, because in recent times everything—especially food—has been awful). When I asked where they’d gotten it, I was told: “A friend took it from one of the hotels and wanted to share a little with us.” My goodness! What a ham that was! Nothing like the ones we buy at the food stands, which are pure flour with a few specks of fat thrown in to make you think it’s actually pork.

Yes, the differences between castes on the Island are brutal, no matter how much it’s called Socialist, no matter how much they talk about equality—which, in essence, doesn’t exist… and can’t exist. It’s a perpetually depressed economy, with a government terrified at the very thought of allowing real economic development, because it sees it as a threat to its control and power.

Still, I want to believe it won’t be long before there’s real change. I want to believe these pitiful circumstances can disappear at the root, and that this matter of our learned helplessness, for example, can be swept away so that future generations won’t have to endure it as we have. This normalized mindset—“I have to eat this bad food because it’s what’s available (if you can find it at all), and they eat well because they’re the bosses”—can’t keep being internalized and accepted as right.

A society can begin to heal as each person heals and helps others to heal. We must have the courage to ensure that abuses and injustices find no space to pass themselves off as truth. That we can rise up as a people. And tell ourselves: That’s not something we’re going to eat anymore.

Read more from the diary of Lien Estrada here on Havana Times.