Before Fidel: The Cuba I Remember

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO Calling me thin as a rail would have been an understatement. I looked more like a toothpick with an olive on top, and being underweight was my most salient trait as a child, at least in my family’s eyes. I liked food, some of it anyhow, but I didn’t eat much, to the consternation of a group of people for whom eating well, and by “well” they meant both quantity and quality, was not merely a matter of ingesting nutrients but an activity with metaphysical implications—and one of the very few points of agreement between the two sides of the family. Two of my father’s sisters, Adela and Charo, and one of his brothers, Luis, were modestly plump, as was my mother’s sister Cristina, and that was that. My father was thin, very, and my mother and the rest of the uncles and aunts seemed firmly anchored in some middle range that enjoyed total immunity to the amount of food they ate. And eat they did. Lunch and dinner were both large meals, the major differences between them being that lunch was eaten quickly and not everyone was necessarily present, and the whole family would show up for dinner and linger at leisure over the dishes and lace food with conversation, and often conversation with food. Bread, rice and salad enjoyed entrenched permanency at both lunch and dinner; neither meal would be presentable without these staples. Soup, light or heavy depending on the time of the year, would come first, and if the soup was light, the beans would come as a side dish to be eaten with the rice, but they would be part of the soup if this was heavy; and the rice was always judged by how separate the grains were, with any degree of pastiness making it unacceptable ; and the main course would usually be chicken, or pork, or beef, or occasionally fish, which did not have many followers. The food was consumed in this order, with the exception of the salad, which everyone 16 seemed to eat at a different juncture and which consisted always of red and green tomatoes and almost always watercress; lettuce and other greens made their appearance in accordance with the seasons. Dessert was served immediately after the end of the meal, no lull here, and it would usually be fruit paste, often guava, and occasionally some fresh fruit in season, although the business of fresh fruits was tricky. The number of tropical fruits available seemed to have no end, but only a few of them were acceptable at the dinner table. Mangoes, never. You could buy four or five of them for a penny and, with the exception of the most obscure varieties, they would go to the pig we fattened for Christmas dinner. Mamey, with its red pulp around a solid black pit, and guanábana, with its multitude of little seeds forcibly adhering to the stringy white pulp, were acceptable, along with pineapple, although pineapple more often came as part of a salad of my family’s own concoction, mixed with avocado and with red wine as dressing. Fruits like anón and chirimoya were considered poor relations to guanábana and undeserving of our table, as undeserving as caimito, mamoncillo, marañón, papaya, zapote, tamarindo, fig, and the different types of banana , which were fine for breakfast but not for lunch or dinner. We ate all of these fruits, of course; we enjoyed the intense aroma they exuded and were puzzled by the paradoxes some of them presented, and sometimes were left wondering if there was a riddle to be solved in them, or a secret message to decipher. Mamoncillo, tiny and round, with a dark green cover halfway between skin and shell, and a delicious but meager amount of a delicate pale orange pulp, had to be eaten by the dozen or the score to satisfy even the weakest appetite, thus tiring your mouth before satiating your desire; and tamarindo, the veritable blending of heaven and hell in fruit form, a long light brown pod with three, four or even more individual dark brown seeds, each seed surrounded by a brown stringy pulp with a powerfully acerbic flavor that repelled your palate while it grabbed your taste buds with a delicious savor that wouldn’t let your mouth get rid of the fruit, so it was not uncommon to eat tamarindo with tears in the eyes. It was only...