I am full.
This is just one of the symptoms of “the Gitmo disconnect” (1) I’ve experienced this week. There were others: The sputtering plane bouncing onto the runway after skimming a lonely coast. “Cuba? I’m in Cuba?” Standing on the shore of Windmill Beach and reminding myself, “Yes, you are in Cuba.” Listening to snatches of Spanish without hearing familiar Cuban sayings like “Coño!” or “Que bola?”
But feeling full in Cuba?
That’s what makes me realize I’m on the other side of the wire, not in “Cuba proper.”
*
I have been to Cuba seven times before this visit, each trip driven by my desire to know and understand where my husband, Francisco, comes from. When he left in 1980 as a refugee in the Mariel Boatlift, he didn’t just leave behind his Central Havana neighborhood; he left behind a large family, including a son.
He wouldn’t see any of them until 27 years later.
Each time I go, I learn more of his history and his family’s life story becomes increasingly intertwined with my own. With each visit, I am brought more closely, more deeply into their lives. I first realize this when my mother-in-law squeezes my thighs in front of the neighbors at a block party sponsored by the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. I am standing over an enormous blackened cooking pot, letting the steam from the bubbling caldosa compete with the humidity to curl my hair, when I feel the sharp pinch of her bony 82 year old hand on my thigh. Then, she slaps my butt, and I hear her tell everyone, with pride I think, “You can tell my son feeds her well.”
*
So much of life in Cuba revolves around food. Scarcity and lack of variety exert a powerful influence over individual and collective psyches. Though I wish I could say otherwise, my visits keep me in a constant state of anxiety, mainly because of food. The meals my mother-in-law cooks for me are special; the portions are larger than anyone else’s, there is more variety than they would have, were I not visiting. And yet, I find most of it dreadful and depressing- the black beans, made with shriveled garlic and onions the size of marbles; the chicken with its skin still on, a necessary source of protein for them, an annoyance to me; the overly dry rice, which my mother-in-law picks through for two hours before cooking, carefully separating the good grains from the bad and discarding tiny stones and other foreign matter. I am always hungry.
When we eat, my stepson asks me about filet mignon and exotic dishes he has never tasted. His father is a chef… what do we eat every night? I feel a certain shame when I tell him. When I treat the family to ice cream at the famous Coppelia—an outing they can’t afford– they ask me to compare the “ice cream of the revolution” to the ice cream I eat at home. “And strawberry?” my stepson asks with the curiosity rare of a young man his age. I take my time before I describe it. How do you explain the flavor of a strawberry to someone who has never had one?
*
So yes, it seems strange that I am in Cuba, “the other Cuba,” inside the wire on a media visit. One of only a handful of journalists and writers given access to the US military base this year, I am here to see things for myself. I don’t expect to break a big story or uncover any secrets. I’m just here to tell whatever stories I find.
The curious irony is that most of the stories are about food.
*
Since my first belly-busting meal of jerk chicken and pork (and cornbread, and slaw, AND rice and beans), I have eaten my way around Guantanamo. Not sure how often we’ll eat or how much, I load up on breakfast the first morning. I have an irrational fear about missing meals, so I’m prone to overcompensate, especially when I’m in unfamiliar territory. I ask for an omelette, made to order, ONE piece of crispy bacon (“Ok,” I tell the food service worker when he asks, “I’ll eat two if you force me.”), a massive tater tot like the kind served at McDonald’s, some honeydew, and Special K cereal in a disposable cup. I don’t eat like this at home. Afterwards, we stop at Starbucks and grab a mocha to go, half the chocolate, extra shot of espresso, please. And don’t hold that whipped cream. It’s looking like a long, hard day. I might need those calories.
My paunch is still pushing over the waist of my jeans two hours later, when the press minders say it’s time for lunch. Already? I’m not hungry. But who knows when dinner will be? I help myself to a salad and polish off this lighter meal with a blend of cappuccino (the kind that squirts out of a convenience store style countertop machine and has the name “Freedom Cappuccino”–seriously) and perk coffee.
The salad has worn off by dinner and I’m ready to eat again. Given a choice about where I’d like to eat, I choose the Irish pub, staffed by Filipinos and Jamaicans. I split nachos and weak salsa with my minders, eat two chicken breasts, and some dirty rice. I’d take the leftovers home for a midnight snack… but there are none. I’m up for hours… thinking about what I’ve seen… and what I’ve eaten.
*
Day 2. I think I’ve learned my lesson. These guys won’t let me go hungry, so I go lighter at breakfast at the mess hall, just some cereal and fruit. “I’ll be hungry just in time for lunch,” I think to myself with a certain degree of satisfaction. But don’t you know, the tour of the detainee food prep kitchen includes samples of meatloaf and mixed vegetables, and I should try the food, don’t you think? I mean, I have a responsibility to let the people know whether the detainees really are eating well.
Lunch follows. Sam, the friendly food prep assistant manager who has worked here five years and calls her job “the best in the world,” treats me to a special meal at the galley: her staff is grilling steaks. Talk about the Gitmo disconnect. I’ve never eaten red meat in Cuba. The grills are set up on a deck overlooking the ocean and the scene is downright bucolic. Except for the fact that I can’t take a picture (the list of censored photographic shots include any coastline pictures). Dinner, just a few hours later, is more chicken, this time, at the Cuban restaurant that, while no longer run by Cubans, retains its long-held reputation for being terribly slow serving your meal. The chicken is served in 35 minutes–we time it–drowning in a flavorless mushroom sauce, some of which is sopped up by a tidy pyramid of rice and beans. I snag a toasted plantain off my minder’s plate. I’m so full that I can’t finish my last supper at Guantanamo.
*
It turns out that I’m not the only person whose anxieties about food are played out over meals in Guantanamo. Detainees, with so little control or freedom, use food as a means of argument and protest. There are periodic hunger strikes on the cell blocks, which send medics scrambling into action with feeding tubes and cans of nutritional supplements. When they’re eating, says Sam, the detainees are demanding about their meals. They won’t accept salad with wilted lettuce leaves (“Yeah, so we get it instead,” one minder mumbles quietly near my ear). As the detainees’ months have turned into years here, changes in health have required new meal options: bland or low sodium dinners, for instance.
Troopers’ anxieties also get stimulated or sated around the table. As I cut into my steak, still sizzling from that oceanside grill, one Navy man tells me, “Steak means something bad’s about to happen.” Other men around the table laugh in agreement. “You know that when they serve you a fat T-bone it’s just a matter of time before the bad news drops.”
*
It’s early, my last day in Guantanamo. I don’t like to eat at this hour, but I do. I pull up at the table with the guys, who quietly bow their heads in turn. I pick up my fork and start eating. Who knows what their prayers are?
NOTES
(1) a term used by Erik Saar in his memoir, Inside the Wire, a book about Saar’s experience working at Guantanamo’s JTF as a military interpreter and intelligence officer. Though Saar used “the Gitmo disconnect” in a different way, he defines the term as a “surreal experience” in which the experience of being at Guantanamo doesn’t quite square with what one expects or what “should” experience.
FEATURED IMAGE: Sam, the cook. All photos by Julie Schwietert Collazo. She toured the base on November, 2006. You can see more photos from that visit HERE.