It is in the Cuban tradition to pay narrative and poetic homages to edibles, from fruits to stews: from the onset of Cuban literary traditions in 17th century poetry paying homage to native flora, to banquet scenes in novels such as Paradiso and Oppiano Licario by the acclaimed 20th century Cuban poet, essayist, and narrator José Lezama Lima. About these latter works, it has been said:
“The act of eating and the culinary festivity of the banquet function in Lezama’s aesthetic thought as metaphors for excess and cultural exchange.” (translation mine)1
And that cultural exchange represented by a distinctive gastronomic tradition survives in the Cuban diaspora. Even if one cannot claim expertise in the culinary enterprises that are the (also diasporic) Caribbean cuisines of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, it will not surprise the casual observer to find out that there are three main staples in the kitchens of those islands: rice, beans, and plantains. But if some of the dishes present in Caribbean cuisines come from Europe, mostly Spain and France and Portugal (let us think of paella, coq au vin or pollo asado al vino, and bacalao –salted dried cod in many forms), with their usual accompaniment of sauces and their emphasis on fish, chicken, and seafood, it is a well-established fact that quite a bit of the cooking and flavors present today in the islands represent centuries of African influence.
It was African slaves that brought rice and plantains to the Americas, and some of the words used to name typical dishes still preserve a distinct African sound: quingambó, the Puerto Rican okra stew (one might even hear how the last two syllables relate to the southern Louisiana gumbo, a region whose Cajun cooking reflects African influences), also called quimbombó in Cuba (where it is—or was—made with the addition of green plantains and smoked pork hocks); mofongo, the Puerto Rican signature dish made with mashed green plantains fried in the flat form of tostones, with pork rinds or chicharrones, and many other ingredients. In Cuba, the corresponding dish is fufú, and in the Dominican Republic it is the delicious mangú that represents its plantain cousins. Some cultural historians have suggested that fufú is not so much African as it is a corruption of the English word food, brought to Cuba by English troops when Havana was captured by the British navy in the 18th century, and repeated by the population who was hungry during the city’s siege and demanded “food, food” [fuh, fuh!] from the invaders (as is argued by Holloway in his “African Crops and Slave Cuisine”). But by all other accounts, the word is of West African origin, still in use in Ghana and other regions.
How do we get to rice, beans, and roast pork from fruits and fish, so present in the Cuban Caribbean environment and which so enthralled the Europeans?
When Spanish navigators and explorers first encountered the lush vegetation in the Bahamas—scientifically proven to be the first Columbus landfall in the Americas, in the small key known today as Samana Cay, then named Guanahaní and renamed San Salvador—and in the islands that are today called Cuba, Puerto Rico, and República Dominicana, these territories were baptized by them as Juana, San Juan and Hispaniola in counterposition to their indigenous Taíno names of Cuba or Cubagua, Borinquen, and Quisqueya. Upon exploration, they offered a cornucopia of vegetables and fruits that were nothing like the grapes, mushrooms, apples and pears that the conquistadores were used to. Soon enough, English slave merchants would bring their boats full with the misery and forced labor of African slaves, who were used to eating root vegetables: such are the ingredients and basic food stuff that go into making casabe/cassava (the Caribbean version of tortillas) made with harina de yuca or manioc/yuca flour—since there was no maize in the Antilles. The Haitians who came from Hispaniola to work in the easternmost province of Cuba and its sugar and coffee plantations brought with them some African beans named by locals congo beans, which they mixed with rice to cook that gloriously prevalent Cuban dish called congris/congrí. Many people, most of them Cubans (but also Wikipedia) mix up the recipes and the representation of this quintessential Cuban and Caribbean dish, so let us clear up the confusion.
The name comes from the Creole French words congo and ris (beans and rice) to produce what today is widely consumed by Cubans in the diaspora (and in their Louisiana variation, Cajun red beans and rice). Not to be confused, congrí is a dish made with red beans, not black (regardless of the confusion shown by many Cubans and now propagated by the Internet); the mixture of black beans and white rice, so ever present in Cuban cuisine, is called by the improbable but graphic name of moros y cristianos (Moors and Christians), no doubt referring to the color of both ingredients and the parallel with people of dark skin and white skin, respectively, that Spaniards saw in the southern provinces of Andalucía (so said expert scholar José Juan Arrom, author of Estudios de lexicografía antillana, in a personal conversation with me, August 1982). If one looks at any menu in Cuban restaurants in Florida, for example, it can be seen that main dishes are often served with accompaniments called “moros y maduros”, meaning black beans with rice joined by fried ripe plantains.
And how did this dish travel from the island across the Florida Straits? Cuban immigration in the 19th century took the form of colonies in Key West—called Cayo Hueso in Spanish— and in Tampa, specifically Ybor City, where Cuban cigar workers contributed to the cause of independence from Spain and listened to the revolutionary speeches of one great Cuban poet, orator, and independence patriot called José Martí. To this day, one finds either Cuban immigrants of the last 50 years or Tampeños, descendants of 19th century Cuban immigrants, on the streets of Ybor City. In that Hispanic enclave, there are restaurants famous for their black bean dishes alongside restaurants owned by Spaniards, whose main menu offerings include the very peninsular paella and where moros y cristianos are not featured, but although they advertise their specialty as paella and there are flamenco dancers, their pastelito de guayaba with cream cheese is a Cuban recipe, and on their website they show Cuban coffee alongside sangria and picadillo (beef hash)
Not only do Florida restaurants replicate in its full splendor the glories of Caribbean cooking, but they also invent a way to spread cultural information about food by means of another form of postmodern art: technology. Now Cuban food is present on the internet in the form of advertisements and blogs, although curiously these sites also reflect the journey across the Florida Straits: to wit, the revival of Nitza Villapol´s recipes. Nitza Villapol was the Cuban Julia Child, and most Cuban women kept her cook book Cocina al minuto [Cuisine per minute, or on time] and watched her television program, which was on the air for 45 years (in postrevolutionary times and during the Special Period, Nitza had to make do with the ingredients she had, and many talk about her recipe for yogurt omelet). Cuban writer Antonio Jose Ponte, who resides in Spain, deals with this theme in recent lectures: “No tenemos recetas para los alimentos del futuro” (We Do Not Have Recipes for Future Foods) was the title of the address he presented at New York University and El Ateneo de Santander in 2013 and 2014, and in which he explored—as he had done before in Las comidas profundas—the rigors experienced by Cuban gastronomy during those hard years of post-Soviet Cuba, and the role played by Nitza Villapol. In addition, coffee table books count among them a best seller in 2015: to wit, The Cuban Table: A Celebration of Food, Flavors, and History, by Ana Sofía Peláez and Ellen Silverman by St. Martin’s Press, lavishly illustrated. An instance of artistic technology at the service of Cuban gastronomy would also be the blog-magazine Cuba Material, where there is a section dedicated to recipes from pre-Revolutionary Cuba, 1959 and before, titled “Los platos perdidos” [The Lost Dishes].
So today, it would not surprise the onlooker to find a mojito bar at a Las Vegas casino, or even at a hotel in Thailand. There is a Peruvian saying that encapsulates best what we used to say in Spanish, “el mundo es un pañuelo”, the world is a handkerchief: “el mundo es una pelotita”, you hear them say in Lima, “the world is a little ball”, meaning mainly that coincidences are strange, but also that the planet Earth is shrinking because we travel and know each other better, country to country, due to telecommunication technology. And so, the Cuba question is a global one, and Cuban icons have spread in the way that cultural anthropologists could have predicted: pork lathed in garlic-citrus marinade or mojo can be ordered, alongside a Cuban rum drink called mojito, on the other side of the world.
Notes
1 Armando Valdés-Zamora, “Fragmentos a su imán: un modelo de espacio interior en la imaginación literaria cubana”, in Gravitaciones en torno a la obra poética de Lezama Lima, Laurence Breysse- Chanet e Ina Salazar, eds. (Paris: Éditions Le Manuscrit, 2010): 268-276.