Little Milk & Imported Gouda Are Burying Cuban Cheese
Even with plenty of money in your pocket, it is not so easy to buy a product that has been disappearing from Cuban markets and homes.
By Natalia Lopez Moya (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – Inseparable companion of the wedge of guava and constant presence in the hands of the sellers who display their merchandise on the sides of the road, white or Creole cheese was so common in our lives that we only knew how to value it when it began to become more expensive and scarcer every day. Now, a wave of synthetic and tasteless products is giving the coup de grace to the cheese of farmers.
“I was born in Sancti Spíritus, a very rural province where we are proud to make one of the best cheeses in Cuba,” recalls Pascual, 81, a resident of Havana for six decades. This week, the old man’s sister visited him from her native Jatibonico. “She managed to bring two pounds of cheese made by our cousin, but she told me to eat it slowly because it is the last production: he is selling the farm.”
Pascual cut a thin slice, sat down in the armchair on the terrace and took the first bite. Suddenly, he remembered his mother’s scream from the courtyard of his childhood telling him not to climb so high on the mango tree. The smell of the mountain flooded everything, and he saw the milkman placing bottles at the doors of the houses with the first rays of the sun. He heard the neighbor’s rooster and the noise that his father made, machete in hand, when he cut the grass that grew at the entrance to their home, made of planks and palm trees.
The second bite took Pascual to the Military Service where that white cheese had killed his hunger many times. “The bread arrived still warm; they gave me a large piece and put a slice inside; if there was a little bit of guava nearby, even better.” When the Rafter Crisis happened in the summer of 1994, his eldest son took to the sea with several friends. They were finally intercepted and taken to the Guantánamo Naval Base. He now lives in Tampa.
“The only thing he could carry was some water and a piece of white cheese; eating that for the week they were adrift was how he was saved,” he recalls now. “In Tampa, you can buy all the cheese you want, cheddar and mozzarella mainly, but he tells me that it doesn’t have any taste, nothing like that farmers’ cheese bathed in seawater; there’s nothing like it.” The sour smell spreads over the terrace; an almost blind dog approaches and Pascual gives him a piece. The animal swallows it quickly and begs for more.
The journey to the past, over a piece of cheese, is over. “I’m going to save what I have left for some spaghetti that I want to make on the weekend,” he explains. Inside the refrigerator, wrapped in a cloth that was once a baby’s diaper, is kept the treasure that has arrived from a farm in Sancti Spíritus, where the arms of his cousin have beaten the milk, sweat has been mixed with the whey, and an improvised press with two boards and a tourniquet has given it form.
A few kilometers from the farm for sale, in the La Plaza Boulevard market in the city of Sancti Spíritus, a pound of Creole cheese costs 450 pesos this week, 100 more than in these days in December last year. But this is not its highest price; it reached 550 last June. (Most Cubans earn under 4,000 pesos a month.)
However, even with plenty of money in your pocket, it is not so easy to buy a product that has been disappearing from Cuban markets and homes to the same extent that livestock production is sinking, hit by the lack of animal feed, the wave of illegal slaughter that keeps cattle owners without support and the State controls that force farmers to comply with the deliveries of milk agreed with Acopio, the State purchaser.
“Making cheese takes time and a lot of work; this is not sewing and singing,” a merchant from La Plaza Boulevard defends himself when a customer complains about the price of the product. Nearby, a private store, full of imported products, offers a pound of Gouda cheese at 2,100 pesos. This cheese has a high demand,” clarifies the smiling employee. “You can buy the entire block that is three and a half kilograms or we can sell it to you by the pound,” he says. The label has the name of the Spanish firm Vima.
Some of the imported cheeses that arrive on the Island are synthetic. These are dairy preparations made from fats, fragments of other cheeses, starches, salts and dyes. These ingredients are ground, mixed and melted. As a general rule they contain a lot of salt. They don’t have the typical holes that fermentation leaves, and they are very high in calories, but among Cubans they are surrounded by a halo of healthy and tasty foods.
Thankfully it melts; it can stretch and is quite photogenic, but the Gouda cheese that arrives in Cuba absolutely lacks personality. It comes in rectangular bars and without those holes inside that create the action of bacteria during the maturation of the product. With artificial color, wrapped in plastic and odorless, the imported cheese has captivated Cubans and intimidated the local rancher.
That unequal fight is seen everywhere. In a cafeteria located on Zanja Street in Central Havana, the bulletin board shows the superiority that customers give to foreign cheese. If you don’t have a lot of money, you will have to settle for a small pizza, about 17 centimeters in diameter, made with farmers’ cheese for 200 pesos. But if you can spend more and, in addition, want to give an image of solvency, then you will have to pay 350 for a similar product but with Gouda. Almost everyone who arrives asks for this last combination.
However, Pascual has positioned himself in his own way in that encounter between Creole and industrial cheese, with colorful labels in which a chubby cow smiles. Wrapped in a thin fabric, his cheese remans the last piece of a food in the refrigerator that has the ability to transfer him back to his childhood, to the patio with the orange and tamarind trees where he grew up. He chews it calmly and hears the scream of his mother who tells him to get out of there, that the snack is already on the table. A sandwich with a white slice, full of holes, that protrudes on each side of the bread, awaits him.
Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba.
How interesting. I looked up cheese shops in Tampa, and there are several of them. Sounds like his son just doesn’t know where to go. Another fun fact (coming from someone who has traveled the world): the absolute worst cheese I’ve ever had in my life was in Cuba (in Santiago, to be exact). I’ll never forget it. If you want good cheese, venture to France, Switzerland, or even Colombia. This really glorifies things – and food – in Cuba. The palette there is, quite frankly, extremely limited. I’m sure he has fond memories of this one specific food item that he associates with his family (don’t we all…), but Cubans aren’t really known for their discerning taste – mostly because their options have been so limited for so long.
I also have traveled to Cuba quite a few times and I can expertly say, Cuban food in Cuba is succulent and immensely delicious.
Two immediate foods come to mind. One, home made tamales are a Cuban staple and sumptuous. One goes to the local market and purchases hand picked fresh corn, not the GMO tasteless corn – factory farms produce in the West.
The Cuban corn is then separated from its cob and mixed together with a some home grown garlic, some tenderizing pork fat, some freshly grown green/red peppers, some salt, and the mixture is ready to be tenderly wrapped in the original fresh corn husks.
More often than not Cuban women wrapping the tamales have learned this Cuban culinary tradition from their mothers who have passed down the tradition over many generations. The tamales are now ready to be boiled. Once cooked the succulent dish is often paired with the next tasty and hearty offering – roast pig.
Talk about mouth watering wholesome meat, presuming one is a meat aficionado. This meat is not loaded with additives and preservatives like factory raised pigs, nor has the meat been sitting on a supermarket meat bunker for days waiting to be sold. This Cuban pig has been forging on natural food, or if kept in a pen given fat enabling natural elements like wholesome corn, soy, and kitchen vegetable scraps.
Properly prepared on a spit and manually rotated for hours and hours and as the meat slowly absorbs the intense charcoal produced heat, the cooking meat emits an irresistible aroma that makes one’s stomach growl.
Once the pig is completely cooked it is slowly dismounted from its spit to be carved and distributed to waiting plates paired with those described tamales and one’s favourite cold beverage. Nothing is wasted. The succulent left over meat is refrigerated and served the following days in tasty sandwiches or pitas.
Again, these are just two Cuban succulent foods among many that are irresistibly good and nutritious found throughout the island. How many tourists have I met who stay at “cases particular” when visiting Cuba and pay the home owner to purchase a home grown pig to be rustically roasted – Cuban style. Absolutely awesome!
Every culture does it. Older people wax poetic about the quality or taste or however being ‘better’ is measured in their description of something from their youth. Today’s music, movies and automobiles never compare to those of days gone by. Here’s the truth: with a few exceptions, most of our consumables today are genuinely better. In this post, a son in Tampa tells his father in Cuba that although he can buy all the cheese he wants and in more varieties than he can imagine, the Cuban cheese of his childhood was better. I call BS. What is true is that most people value the smallest things from the past that in the present are taken for granted. Cuban food from years gone by was probably better but only because it was so much more appreciated. I have traveled to Cuba quite a few times and I can expertly say, Cuban food in Cuba sucks. I will take the mozzarella cheese sold in Tampa today over the Cuban cheese of the past and the present. Has anyone tasted the “cheese” Cubans put on the street pizzas sold in Havana? Gimme a break!