I.
The man was looking at me with distrust when I asked who buys la carne rusa (the Russian Spam). He was a manager at the 79th street Tropical Supermarket. I’d gone in that day, on my way home, to hunt for good discounted wine, but once there a large sign at the front of the store called my attention. It featured a big photo of shredded meat and above it read “Carne Rusa.” Below, there were a few cans, some with pictures of cows on them and some with a camouflage design. Had it not been for the Russian lettering, I would have thought the cans to be U.S. army surplus.
“Cubanos,” he said with a shrug. “Does it sell?” I asked in Spanish. “Of course it sells! Or we would not carry it,” he answered, then turned around.
Carne Rusa (in its minced beef and chopped pork varieties) was a brand new addition to Tropical’s multi-ethnic inventory. What made the sighting unusual, however, was that this was no specialized gourmet store. This was nothing like the upscale, caviar-haven Marky’s Gourmet, of Miami Herald and NPR fame, further East, also on 79th, where some Cubans allegedly trekked to fulfill their socialist nostalgia with the overpriced canned Russian meat. The Tropical supermarket sells no caviar; it is possibly the cheapest grocery store chain in Miami. This one in particular is located at a sixty-plus year old shopping center (apparently the oldest of its kind in South Florida, and it shows), between a Goodwill and a construction site, and targets a clientele of poor immigrants from Haiti, Central America and the Caribbean. Accordingly, its Russian beef is, well, no pricey import, but, as it turns out, a made-in-the-USA brand named Levadia.
Tropical Supermarket is where one can buy Haitian okra, corn on the cob, avocados, plantains, yucca, and many other vegetables at inexpensive prices, as well as the best Mexican salsa made daily by the attendant at the fish counter. Food stamps are the common currency — so much so that a cashier once asked me if I had children, as she was about to recommend that I too apply for them. Another time a disheveled man followed me to an aisle to offer me $50 in stamps in exchange for $25 cash (I could not do it). Now, the ever-shrinking U.S. welfare can also cover canned Russian meat, at least of the domestic kind.
My ethnographic zeal was not enough as to buy and try a Russian spam surely fit for a camping trip in the Everglades. Instead, I stood in front of the store to text my pictures to my friend Jacqueline Loss, a pioneering scholar of Soviet-Cuban cultural encounters. An old Haitian man sat on a bench by the entrance, staring into the distance, while two others roamed the parking lot, slowly gathering the mismatched carts and occasionally exchanging Creole phrases among themselves. Older women went in, and then exited carrying the store’s heavily-loaded orange plastic bags. I had to wonder whether the Cubans would come to fulfill their nostalgia, or if it would be in Miami’s inner-city where the carne rusa would prove its universality beyond Communism, beyond Cuba, and, thanks to Tropical, beyond purchasing power.
II.
As I looked at the different brands of carne rusa that were popping into my phone from Ariana’s number, I confess, I could not really taste the meat inside. Instead, my palate was doused in literary references. For example, in Adelaida Fernández de Juan’s prize-winning short story “Clemencia bajo el sol,” also the subject of a theater adaptation: A Cuban woman kills her neighbor, a Cuban man, because of the solidarity she feels for her Soviet “sister” who’d been deceived by her husband. As part of the rich atmosphere of international neighborliness that she evokes, she describes how, like the apples in a jar, the canned carne rusa killed a lot of hunger pangs. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In the recent Univisión report on the longing for things Russian among Cubans in Miami, there is a reference to ostalgia as meaning nostalgia for a bygone time, but in fact, it’s a feeling that it is situated within a particular historical moment-that of the past with the Ost or East. It was a past in which carne rusa, like so many other Soviet products, was ubiquitous, served in cafeterias, in schools, and at the workplace, that is to stay, integrated within the Cuban diet, hardly identifiable as exotic. While most recall that carne rusa was purchasable por la libre, at regular stores, some also recall that it was offered on the libreta (the rationing card) at one time. This imprecision of memory with regard to modes of consumption is hardly uncommon; when many aspects of the Soviet past are retold by Cubans today, the “facts” are often fuzzy.
When Univisión covered carne rusa, it made reference to Marky’s, a gourmet store geographically close to the Tropical but a world away. The report almost read like an advertising plug for the store. In that account, Cuban immigrants– with tastes distinct from their compatriots of the Golden Exile decades before, who left before the island’s importation of such products–still take pride in enjoying the exceptional status that they have as Cubans in the United States. That is, to say, once the Cuban “Soviet” staple disappeared from the map with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it acquired a new kind of delicacy status. Presumably, its made-in-the-U.S.A. rendition now forms part of a wide-range of “cultural” remittances back to the island that also include Soviet-era cartoons.
But, it’s the placement, and the placement vis-à-vis not other Russian products, but rather other canned “staples” of U.S. Latinos within the Tropical supermarket that I find most fascinating. Here, there is no escaping the fact that Cubans, who are known for seeing themselves as white in polls, are, in many ways, immigrants like other immigrants, many of whom are of color. Yet, allegedly having asked the manager for their carne rusa, these Cubans are getting it at Tropical, and along with it, some other products that they didn’t know as well on the island, like smoked fish. And if, somehow, they could not truly stick to the Cuban ajiaco (that Cuban national stew that stands for the metaphor of Cuban syncretic identity), at least this manager knew well enough to place them alongside the good old reliable Goya, readying them for the “melting pot.”
With such a variegated panorama of Russian meat brands that contrasts with the generic Soviet export of yesteryear, I could not help but think of the curious stories about the Smirnof legacy of vodka in the Soviet Union that the esteemed writer José Manuel Prieto relates in the travelogue Treinta días de Moscú (Thirty Days in Moscow). There, a representative of the Smirnov empire, not the Occidental brand of Smirnoff, but the one that had been dormant since the nationalization of the vodka industry, talks about the return of the authentic vodka post 1991; that is, not the vodka produced by the other Smirnoffs who went into exile, producing vodka in France and later in the United States. While the Smirnov legacy may have more in common with that of the “authentic” Cuban rum of Bacardi, made outside of Cuba, for the U.S. market, the story of Russian meat, as introduced to the Cubans through the Soviets and found at the Tropical market carries with it the quality of the masses that just can’t be registered in the gourmet post-Soviet Russian shops in Miami.
So…will the real carne rusa please stand up?
(All photos by Ariana Hernandez-Reguant)