The Day Fidel Died by Patrick Symmes

Author:Patrick Symmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

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The libreta was life for Cubans, decade after decade. Scarcity was nothing new—in the old republic, rural areas experienced six months of brutal hunger while waiting for the next cane harvest. But the revolution made almost everything—even bread—scarce, and that scarceness became yet another instrument of control. No one—not even the regime’s worst enemies—was denied the basic monthly allotment of food, but the endless waits, the dramas of provision and denial, were one more way of integrating everyone into the official system. “They call it the supply booklet,” noted Elizardo Sánchez, the human rights activist. “But it’s a rationing system, the longest-running one in the world. The Soviets didn’t have rationing for as long as Cuba. Even the Chinese didn’t ration this long.” To be dependent on the state for food was to be dependent on the state for life.

After 2010, the situation for food improved again, but not because the ration was larger or of better quality. Peas and potatoes had disappeared, and the official workplace lunches available at staff canteens across Cuba—subsidized food that was essential in a country where more than 90 percent of adults worked for the government—were cut back, reduced from a meal to a puny sandwich. But something else happened in 2010 that altered the food picture—Raúl’s reforms. Self-employment shot up each year of the new decade, with hundreds of thousands of tiny private businesses launched, particularly in tourism, with its attendant demand for quality restaurants.

By 2015, something was definitely different, and not just in Havana. In Sancti Spíritus, an ancient and sleepy town in south central Cuba that I had not visited for two decades, I found small restaurants and ice cream shops proliferating, with better food and lower prices that attracted actual Cubans—memorable for me, since I had only once or twice in my decades in Cuba eaten a meal next to normal Cuban customers who could pay their way without my help. Havana, with its large foreign community and central role in tourism, was far ahead of the curve at this, but even there, the change by 2015 was rapid and startling.

It hit me as I was rolling in a rusted taxi back to Ernesto’s house in the old Chinatown. The Chinese had moved out, mostly, and the revolution had moved in black families. Ernesto and his sister, Regla, had grown up across the harbor, in a poorer neighborhood, and Chinatown had been a promotion. In the hungry 1990s, there had been just a few dismal restaurants here that offered little Chinese character and poor attempts at noodles and gravy.

But Raúl’s economic reforms had started with the stomach, and liberalized rules for restaurants meant that Havana had sprung to life with new opportunities. Even little Chinatown was glowing, every spot in the main alley now taken by a restaurant. The dismal kitchens that once were rumored to serve rat meat were now cleaned up, dressed with Chinese decor, and served recognizably Chinese food made with wholesome ingredients. Even the prices were lower, and more Cubans had more money to buy meals.

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