Cuba’s Piglets with Wings

By Aurelio Pedroso (Progreso Semanal)

HAVANA TIMES – In all his magical realism perhaps even Gabriel Garcia Marquez could never have imagined pigs with wings or that one afternoon while two pelicans were flying and keeping a prudent distance along the coast of Miramar, suddenly, without expecting it, a hasty phone call, one of those that are made to a neighbor when they haven’t noticed that their storage room is on fire. It was the news of pork on the very sidewalk.

Then the person downstairs said it, that the thing about flying piglets wasn’t a fairy tale because as an adult he could verify that those little animals came from the sky. Not in free fall, but with their wings making perfect landing movements on the family runway-dinner table.

Pound ready-made steaks at 132 Cuban pesos [about a quarter of a respectable monthly salary]. A figure unattainable for many, acceptable to others, at a time when the product is practically disappeared from markets, although not from the TV newscast.

No authority inquires who sold and who bought the meat because they know if they do they will find the best of the complicit answers extracted from “Fuenteovejuna”, one of the leading works of Spanish literature.