What Chocolate Is To Cubans
HAVANA TIMES – Almost everyone loves chocolate. And if you live in Cuba, like I do, it must be said that tasting this nectar of the gods in the form of a bar or bonbon injects you with miraculous optimism.
Anyone who lives in or has been to the first world knows that shopping centers have shelves overflowing with all kinds of shapes and wrappings that promise to take you to paradise. It’s so hard to choose! Especially if your wallet is light or if a friend or family member is the one treating you.
You can’t ask for everything. Not even by claiming you’ve gone decades without sweets. That you don’t want to die without tasting everything that has ever been invented for human delight.
So you choose one or two, trusting your instinct won’t fail you, and you wonder why these delicious little things can’t be part of your everyday routine.
A few months ago, a relative wanted to give us a special gift using the Super Market 23 service (an online shopping service for customers in Cuba paid for from abroad). The result, to our surprise, was a variety of chocolates that, I confess, nearly drove us mad.
Your palate can take you down moist, crunchy, slippery paths—maybe even foamy ones—while you try to locate that flavor in your mind, lost somewhere in childhood or maybe in another life.
Your personality changes in a matter of seconds. You feel joyful, almost euphoric; you want to laugh, to dance (even if you never have before); you feel like part of that faraway world where everything is smooth, functional, safe.
You feel pampered by life. Chocolate, like caresses, restores your faith and lifts your self-esteem.
Of course, with this hunger for pleasure, it’s impossible to ration out the generous confections. You end up eating more than you should, and your brain also reacts with a nausea of frenzied stimuli. You feel bad. You regret eating so much, but deep down, you’re only waiting for the slightest relief so you can sin again.
Oh, addiction born of scarcity can be a problem. You don’t have enough time or sweets to saturate your taste buds. To behave like a sensible person. To get past an initiation that repeats itself, each time as an exceptional circumstance. There’s no hope that your everyday life will incorporate this forbidden element and that it will no longer be reserved for the chosen few.
Self-denial can breed neurosis. So even knowing it’s expensive, you risk buying a chocolate bar at any nearby kiosk.
And with disappointment, you discover it’s a scam: a greasy mixture with some chocolate added and a fake wrapper. But it satisfies nothing—not the need, not the longing, not the dream.
It dissolves in your mouth with a bitter sensation of failure.
And if you insist on trying, on trusting that this one or that one might be the real thing, you’ll relive the experience of a disappointed palate and a drained wallet. With no spiritual reward.
In the past, the bars labeled “Baracoa” (chocolate from the eastern part of the Island) were reliable, but now everything seems infiltrated by spurious production that tries to steal the merit and history of the real tchocolath—the sacred food of the Aztecs, with secret powers (not only aphrodisiac), but imbued with that magic that sweetly alters human destinies.
I am sure that an exact dose of chocolate helps with the challenges life throws at us, wherever we are.
Why can’t Cubans even count on this minimal, almost childish satisfaction amid the perpetual daily havoc?