Underwhelming Gastronomic Adventures in Cuba

If you ask anyone who's ever been to Cuba what they remember most about their trip the answers will usually fall into the same three categories; the music, the beaches and the architecture/old cars. But no one, NO ONE, ever says "oh, you know, I had the most AMAZING plate of rice and beans. I mean, what a great way to get your complete protein!" Yes everyone loves the rum and the cigars but why is every other consumable in Cuba so mediocre? If you can bear to be cynically honest with yourself you notice that most middle-aged Cubans are quite plump. Not hyper-obese, not "I ride my Rascal down the middle of the road to the Walmart to buy 4 litre tubs of ice cream" fat, but people of a certain age are ... THICK! So obviously people are eating something and it must taste okay, otherwise Cuba's number one export would be supermodels and not cohibas (though both provide a pleasant oral experience, I'm sure).

So.

Despite my vegetarian disability working against me I set out to discover what it is Cubans eat, and eat so plentifully.

After an exhausting afternoon of queueing up at immigration, security scans, baggage check, customs and the currency exchange by the time my bag was deposited at the casa particular (Cubans rent out rooms to tourists as a black market method of making a buck) I was mother friggin' STARVING! Thank god only 200 feet away, located in a pleasant cobbled plaza, is Havana's only brew pub. After explaining to the waiter my disability he offered to 'do what he could' and I was tired enough to leave it at that. Before dinner arrived I had already sucked back a frothy mug of their absolutely delicious amber ale, the right balance of bitterness and body with a delicate lashing of sweetness on the back of the palate. Dinner, by comparison, was a horrible disappointment. The rice and stewed vegetables with a side of sliced raw cabbage bespoke of the most depressing institutional fare, the kind made famous in the workhouses and orphanages of Dickensian England. Thank god the precious and well crafted brew was there to fill the hunger gap, but Cuba and I were off to a bad start.

The next day delivered below my already lowered expectations. You know you're in a country that truly doesn't understand vegetarianism when you are forced to eat the exact same meal for both lunch and dinner because of the simple fact that there's NOTHING ELSE YOU CAN EAT! Of course there's always salad! This is a picture of my dinner at the extremely expensive (for Cuba) Tropicana nightclub which has been in operation since 1939 back when Cuba was a tropical version of Las Vegas. This storied institution had only one item on their menu I could eat, a cheese sandwich. Granted there is a lot of cheese there, enough to put a bull elephant into a fat coma. And if you're wondering what that delightful red condiment is which lines the lower edge of my top bun, it is ketchup. Yes, a cheese and ketchup sandwich. Just like the one I'd eaten for lunch at another tourist-death-trap of a restaurant. Though liberal doses of rum negated my despondency over the lack of victual variety I held out little hope for the days to come.

Day three in Cuba dawned with a warm and sultry greeting, sunshine dusted the cobblestones with gold and children screamed in their raffish way in the park across from the casa. A long and peaceful walk along the Malecon, or seawall, brought me to another of Cuba's landmarks from the good old, bad old days when gangsters and rich Americans used Cuba as their off-shore grotto for bad behaviour; la Hotel Nacional de Cuba. Absolutely everyone has stayed here from Al Capone and Frank Sinatra to Benicio del Toro and Steven Spielberg, even Jean Chretien stayed here (that wily frenchman!). The beautiful old building is a testament to "how things used to be made" and the lobby spanks of the glamourous days when art deco ruled supreme. The hotel sits on a small promontory overlooking the sea. What with the luxurious surroundings, the vitamin-D giving sunlight and the pleasant salty breeze, it seemed like a good place to have lunch. Of course I ate salad (ensalada de estacion, they call it) and rice and beans washed down with a crisp Cuban lager. It may have been the location or the framed photo of Will Smith which gazed on me as I ate, or it could have been the litre of rendered pork fat the beans were cooked in, but these were the best goddamn rice and beans I've ever tasted. So again, little in the way of surprises, but the execution was perfection.

Most of the best meals I had while in Cuba were the massive breakfasts prepared by the senora of the casa, Damayi.

The great thing about these epic meals was that aside from the standard bread and egg component you get to chow down on a massive plate of salad and then an equally massive plate of fruit. You feel like such a glutton because of the sheer volume of food but it's all ultra healthy so NO GUILT! As I worked through these morning feasts Damayi would stand at the stove making pot after pot of sweet strong Cuban coffee and gossiping about the ongoing drama of her extended family.

In Santa Clara I stayed at another casa particular, an old colonial building in the centre of the town with windows onto the adjacent Parqeo Vidal.

This feast was prepared by the wife and mother of our host, Miguel, who hovered constantly at my elbow wearing one of his many fedoras and nagging me to recommend him to my friends in Canada. The bean soup had been slow simmered with fatty pieces of pork for many hours which made the broth hearty with a great depth of flavour.

The plantain were perfectly fried with a crispy outer shell and a creamy centre. More eggs, of course, and rice with salad. But everything was so lovingly prepared that it was truly fabulous.

This sight truly tempted my vegetarian convictions. The caramel coloured skin of a well roasted pig sets off some kind of primal device in my brain, I begin to salivate and clench my toes, my pupils dilate and an overwhelming desire for pork floods my being. All over the tiny town of Remedios there are street vendors all selling slabs of whole roast pig on white buns. As a sidebar, Cubans almost exclusively eat their bread in bun form, it is almost impossible to find sliced bread.

These vendors are set up to cater to the crowds who attend the annual festival of las Parrandas. The entire population of Remedios and the surrounding area appear to have three goals on the day of las Parrandas; blow shit up, eat lots of pork-on-a-bun and get stupid, stumbling, blindingly drunk on rum. At around noon I saw dozens of people swanning around the main plaza with nearly empty 26ers of rum in their hands. And why not? It's Christmas.

Back in Havana I made a pilgrimage to the bar El Floridita, where the world's first daiquiri was allegedly made. Ernest Hemingway spent so much time here that there is a bronze statue of him in the corner, leaning against the bar. The room was decorated in plush red velvet drapes ornamented with oversized candy canes. A plate of salty plantain chips appeared on the table almost immediately, the drinks were strong and tuxedoed waiters moved with professional efficiency. This is a bar where it would be very easy to get comfortable a la Hemingway who allegedly once drank 13 double daiquiris in one sitting. But at 6 convertible pesos per daiquiri maybe it's good not to get TOO comfortable.

Cuba certainly was no culinary wonderland but what it lacked on the plate it made up for it in so many other ways; the warmth of its people, the music which emanated from every home and plaza and the ethereal otherworldliness of place stuck in time and an ideal which are fading away before my eyes.

So it's with an authentic daiquiri in my hand and a Cuban cigarillo between my lips that I bid adios to Cuba. Mucho gusto!

Battle Royale

If love is a battlefield, then my life is love-ly.

This week I feel besieged from all sides, nothing can be taken for granted and even life's more mundane elements are in revolt.

Anyone who has been reading my blog knows that there is a long-standing duel between my inflatable bed and me. When I moved here in the summer it seemed cheap and practical. And for a time it served me well, inching me closer to my ceiling fan during the sweaty nights of the humid Toronto summer. However, we are allies no more.



Granted I expected the queen-size air mattress to be punctured eventually. When the sad day arrived I used one of the patches that came with it and moved on. But our relationship was never the same. The bed became temperamental, she wouldn't stay inflated for as long as she used to and deep down I knew that we no longer trusted each other. Another puncture, another patch. Then, mid-exam week, the situation turned nuclear. TWO PUNCTURES! And one on the bed's fuzzy upper surface. At first I lamely tried to cover the hole with masking tape which would sometimes hold long enough for me to get to sleep. But more and more as I would settle down for my slumber the pressure of my body would cause air to whine most insolently through the perforation.



(By the way, your eyes are not deceiving you. That oblong gash in my sheets is exactly what it looks like. A vagina. No. I'm kidding. That's where my threadbare sheets have actually ripped down the middle. Am I classy or what?)

I went to Canadian Tire and bought more patches. But these never stood a chance. My bed hated me now and was determined to undermine my comfort (and strain my neck). In desperation I tried to remove the fuzz from the bed's vinyl surface with my razor. But my razor was too sharp and her skin too thin. I would apply a new patch every night, praying that it would hold, but to no avail. I must now reconcile myself to the fact that my bed doesn't want me anymore. This morning I pumped her up at 9 a.m. when the door buzzer woke me at noon I was lying flat on the floor.



It's over between us. And so tonight I'll try to fortify my yoga mat with some additional blankets to make a poor facsimile of the bed I used to know and love.

Winter weather has descended on Toronto so that every exposed area of skin becomes numb and feels like some kind of dead organism coating your body. I knew it was coming and I dislike it just as much as I thought I would.

Every day I walk over to the campus gym only 10 minutes away from my apartment. Unfortunately the Chuck Taylor knockoffs I bought at Payless Shoes do little to protect my feet from the elements. Which is absolutely shocking considering the shoes consist of "sturdy canvas" and a "full half inch of rubber sole." When I yank them off in the change room I usually have lost all circulation in the bottom of my feet. Because there's no blood making it through my capillaries my skin becomes yellow, character-on-the-Simpson's yellow. It takes a good fifteen minutes of grunting exertions on the elliptical trainer for my extremities to tingle back to life.

When I'm done punishing my body I throw my winter wear on over top of my gym gear for the walk home. It seems silly to squeeze my sweaty ass back into my jeans for such a short walk.

On Monday I left the gym just as the early pre-solistice dusk was falling. Fine particles of snow blew into my eyes at a 45 degree angle and my cheeks stung like well-used pincushions. At last I was home. Now, just to put the key in the door and waltz into the heated loveliness of the foyer.



But my key stuck only a quarter of the way in. I tried again. I jiggled. I rammed. I cajoled. I took a deep breath. I jiggled again. Nothing. My key wouldn't slide into the lock. A warmly dressed couple stared at me through the foggy window of the adjacent poutine shop where they chewed their hot grease bomb with bovine placidity. My post-gym flush was beginning to fade and tendrils of icy wind wound themselves up my legs and caressed my upper thighs.

FUCK!!!

I dug around in the bottom of my gym bag for my cell phone and called my landlord. She called one of my neighbours who came to let me in. Though I'd probably been outside the building for only 15 minutes or so it felt like ages. The temperature that day, with the wind chill, was -23 degrees.

It turns out some water had gotten into the lock and frozen solid. The next morning my landlord shows up at my apartment door with a mini can of WD40.

"I already put so much in there the door is working now, but don't leave the apartment without it!"

After the front-door-not-opening debacle I had a hot HOT shower and settled down for a quiet evening. But a strange gnawing sound began to issue from the kitchen.



I had seen a mouse once before so I wasn't exactly surprised. There are still plastic garbage bags full of packing peanuts littering my kitchen so assumed that Mr. Mouse was commandeering some material for building his nest. It's not that I'm afraid of mine per say but where there's mice, there's mouse shit. Mouse shit is bad business. Also where there are mice there are mouse teeth, mouse teeth can bite you. A mouse bite means a tetanus shot, a shot (of any kind) is bad business.

So I decided to go on the offensive. Walking loudly into the kitchen I gave the pile of syrofoam peanut bags a tentative kick with my slippered foot. Nothing. A more aggressive kick.

Then I almost feel over backwards. A morbidly obese mouse leapt out of my Ikea garbage can, clearing the rim with inches to spare, and skittered away out of sight.

After my heartbeat returned to normal I took out the garbage and stored the organic scraps from the preparation of my evening meal in a bag in the refrigerator. Subsequently Mr. Mouse has taken his business elsewhere.

The ongoing saga of the bed aside, I have been largely successful in rebuffing the attacks levelled at me by life during the past week. The WD40 never leaves my purse and I have a rotting bag of vegetable scraps in my fridge but I'd say that's a small price to pay for victory.

Look! My salad is Christmas colour coordinated.

No Rush

The last semester of my late return to higher learning is almost at an end. I've managed to survive living in the Bermuda triangle of grease (that being Pizza Hut, Ho Lee Chow and the downstairs poutine shop) without turning into a whale. Despite my rusty intellect which, until recently, was more attuned to eyeballing the correct amount of Crown Royal for 12 'King Kong' shots than to writing a critical compare/contrast essay on 'The Tempest,' I jumpstarted my brain function back to life. I was pleased to find that underneath the encrustation of rust there's still a blade with a bit of an edge on it.

When I think about the process of going back to school I feel deeply humbled.



I've learned how to make my own refried beans because those fancy canned ones are now too expensive for my meagre budget.

When my air mattress sprang multiple leaks I did my best to repair them with scotch tape, which worked very well for all of 20 minutes. So a couple of times a night I roll onto the floor to switch on the pump and reflate. Though the mornings seem colder when I wake up in a trough in the middle of my saggy bed, my ass touching the floor, and the mounds of my useless bed enclosing me like a fort.

I sit in class with people almost a decade younger than me and I marvel at their focus, their seriousness, their (for lack of a better word) 'adultish-ness.'

Visions of my 19-year-old self confront me when I look at them. I was dreadlocked, pierced, stoned (sometimes) and with a chip on my shoulder the size of a Buick, it's more like a teenage film cliche than who I used to be.



But the humility and admiration I have for my classmates has a vein of reservation running through it. In our print media classroom we all sit in front of our own massive flatscreen monitor. People also bring in their own laptops, cameras and smart phones. So many devices designed for something called "communication" which mostly serve to draw our eyes away from the faces directly in front of us and into the online, social media, blog, vlog universe. Which is somehow more valid because those cute witty updates and comments we make are enshrined for all to see. We can preen and revisit our cleverness, link it on our twitter feed, and make sure everyone knows how damn witty we are.

It is such an honour to sit in a class and talk about ethics and story. Now I'm no saint and probably check my facebook account more than a normal person should. However, after serving the drunk and ungrateful masses for the past five years something about the whole situation makes me want to scream.

"These are the best goddamn days of your life people!!!! Let's go to the pub. Let's talk. Let's be YOUNG!"

Today, outside my window, snow is lightly falling. Each flake is doing a dizzy, eccentric dance as it resists its journey to earth.

I relate. Once you hit the ground life is stationary, so why not prolong the dance as much as possible? Why ever stop dancing?