Street Food in Cuba: For Here or To Go?

How consumption Is changing

By Angry GenXer

HAVANA TIMES – I’ll talk about consumption, not about “eating on the street,” because that’s precisely where the heart of the matter lies: what have thousands of small Cuban food businesses turning up on the streets actually become? These aren’t restaurants, paladares, or “stylish” cafés and bars meant for tourists to post pictures on social media with a mojito in one hand and a Cohiba in the other, or for privileged locals who go there to hang out.

My concern here is with what exactly someone—local or foreign visitor—can actually find when walking through the streets of Havana or other towns, looking for a quick meal, an unpretentious coffee, or some prepared food to take home.

How It Used to Be

In the 1990s, the government’s green light for opening small family-run food businesses was both a blessing and a revolution. For the first time since 1968—when such enterprises were banned—Cuban streets and neighborhoods filled with timbiriches (little stands) selling coffee, soft drinks (usually just cold water mixed with imported instant flavored powder), flour fritters, and bread rolls with some “substance” in between (ranging from butter, mayonnaise, sandwich spread, or plain tomatoes to ham and cheese, roast pork, or “hamburgers”—in Cuba, “bread with hamburger” or “cheese pizza” are redundant everyday expressions).

More daring and industrious folks (or those with extra hands to help) sold individual pizzas (different from those in other countries), tamales, or cajitas de comida—boxed meals. Here, neither a hearty sandwich nor a pizza nor a tamal counts as “food.” The cardboard cajitas contained rice (with some black beans), “salad” (shredded raw cabbage, cucumber, and/or tomato), boiled vianda (sweet potato, pumpkin, or yucca), and “protein” (pork, chicken, or fish, usually fried or roasted). In Cuba, that’s called una completa—a full meal.

At the time, private kiosks or cafés were forbidden from reselling industrial food: canned goods, snacks, plain bread, or candy. They had to prepare everything themselves—sweets, sandwiches, pizzas, or completas. Nor could they sell bottled or canned drinks. In private restaurants or paladares, industrial foods and beverages were allowed—but that was for the wealthy.

I remember how, against the backdrop of those multicolored soft drinks made from sugary powders with titanium dioxide, natural juices appeared—mango, guava, orange, tamarind, and lemonade. They cost two pesos, double the artificial drinks. I think they were a blessing for my body, especially my stomach.

The old meat fritas—Cuba’s pre-1968 equivalent of the USA hamburger—never reappeared, despite predictions in La calle del medio, the most pop-style newspaper of the Raul Castro era (is it still published?), when the political line of “more market” was adopted in 2008.

However, since 1990 there was a Cuban version of McDonald’s: state-run hamburger joints that the people nicknamed “McCastro.” The hamburgers—only one type—cost two Cuban pesos. Students like us would wait in line half an hour to an hour and complain: “So expensive!” You could also order pitchers of local cola for twenty centavos. No beer, no desserts, no coffee.

Then came the massive inflation of the Special Period crisis years (only comparable to today’s disaster), but between 1993 and 2021 the state steadily sold beer cans at 1 CUC (first equal to 1 USD, then to 25 workers’ pesos). A can of soda cost half that. Today such memories bring nostalgia.

How It Is Now

Much of that landscape has vanished.

Eating on the street is now a luxury. You no longer see cajitas de comida or cups of natural juice. At most, there are fluorescent-colored instant drinks—like something from a bad sci-fi movie meant to depict radioactive material. Vendors call them “orange,” “passion fruit,” or even “soursop,” though they contain not a trace of fruit. If there’s real juice, it’s industrial, in a Tetra Pak—and priced accordingly. Before Covid, a small business in my neighborhood sold 1.5-liter bottles of farm-made juice for 15 pesos (you had to bring your own bottle). It’s gone now, though the people are still there—and I suppose the farm is, too.

The “meals,” if you can find any, are outrageously expensive and come in thermopack—not cardboard, but polystyrene, adding to environmental pollution and microplastics in my stomach.

You still see fritters, pizzas, sandwiches, tamales, and peanut nougat. Some stands even offer empanadas. Fritas never came back. Prices are less affordable than in the ’90s. Beers are fairly available, from various origins. Many kiosks and cafés sell bottled rum and liquor alongside “kids’ candies.”

The “candies” are another problem. All “flavored with…” but without chocolate, strawberry, or anything natural, they hook children while emptying parents’ pockets—and set the stage for massive waves of diabetes, hypertension, and obesity in a country with a collapsed healthcare system.

Selling industrial food is more profitable and convenient than cooking. It’s the reggaetonization of the stomach and palate, brought to you by the capitalist mipymes (small and medium businesses) in which the Nomenklatura invests, and by the informal market at La Cuevita, which exists to prevent the boiler from exploding. Import businesses are among the most lucrative in Cuba. The economic interests of the establishment’s tycoons shape the people’s tastes.

Next to industrial liquor and candy, many of today’s stands also sell bulk goods like rice and sugar, as well as bags of bread—because even the popular rationing system has collapsed.

This vast cosmopolitan kingdom of imported industrial junk food has almost completely displaced the artisanal street food still visible in major Latin American capitals like Mexico City, Quito, or Bogotá. Cuban streets have lost their gastronomic identity.

Maybe that identity survives in Miami. But I’ve never eaten there.

Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.