Havana Cuba. – They say that thinness, and more than thinness cachexia, are signs of some deadly diseases. They say that weight loss can be associated with cancer, AIDS, some lung diseases, like the one that specialists gave the name of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. And it is that many things are said about thinness, especially in these Cuban days in which it is so difficult to put something in the mouth and chew to swallow, to swallow later.
So many things are said about eating and so much has been written about cooking… I myself have read a great deal about the pleasure that accompanies food, even that torpor that accompanies digestion, which, although it leaves us in a kind of lethargy, does not cease to be pleasant. We Cubans have a certain passion for a well-laid table, for steaming and fragrant dishes; but we have had to make do, like little birds, with crumbs.
I do not remember, because I did not live them, some of those times of stable prosperity that some historians prefer to call “of the fat cows”. I, who was born after the great Cuban disaster, back in 1963, cannot remember a well-stocked pantry. I was born, and I have lived almost all the deficiencies that have plagued the Island, those periods that the communists euphemistically call “special”. I have lived in an eternal Special Period, which became more intense after the collapse of the socialist camp. Sadly, I didn’t even hit the “lean cows.”
I have lived in the middle of the shock that accompanies the empty table, but I still remember my mother’s parsimony “setting the table”; always the tablecloth, always the napkins and each of the cutlery, even if only a couple of them were used. My father mistakenly believed that if each cutlery was in its place, misery would be a little more bearable; and quietly he was wrong, quietly he looked at the cleanliness of the knife that he didn’t use, at the impeccable and shiny cleanliness of the dessert spoons.
And it is that Cuba has been in the Special Period for many years, so many that it is already impressive as if an eternity had passed. And to top it off, we have even put up with being made to believe that a lemonade is the base of everything, that ostrich meat is delicious, that claria is delicious, which perhaps it could be if it hadn’t been eaten so much. I have known the sadness that accompanies a poorly served table. Cuba, and ordinary Cubans, know very well the very poor table, but we have references to what others eat, the worms who hold power.
The Cubans who were attached to the missal put it aside a bit to be accompanied by the supply booklet, that communist prayer book. And over the years the rationing grew, over the years the restrictions became common, they became a sad custom. Sixty years later we continue to suffer from the rationing that grew like weeds. It grew as if it were scolding the teeth that expected more activity, a little movement, a movement that the communists understood as the debauchery of the teeth, of the poor teeth of poor people.
And now we have reached the greatest passivity of those bones that the lips cover and that the tongue caresses. Now we reach the highest point of oral quiet and cachexia, but the sad thing is that not all of them are skinny. While we lose weight, while the “stomach sticks to the spine”, others gain weight without modesty, without shame. And in these days that followed the hurricane we were able to verify it.
These days the bosses became more visible in their tours, in their dialogues with those affected, in their rants to appease the spirits; always dressed in olive green, and always with huge bellies. These days we saw the face of the “president” of the Republic, but much more his belly, a bulging belly, rather enormous. In these days we saw a belly that denotes the voracity of the “president”, and can even be assumed the delight that food provokes. These days we saw governors and first secretaries of the Party with distended bellies that threatened to burst those button fastenings, and even the skin, each tissue, to reveal inflated intestines from eating so much.
And ordinary Cubans, so similar in their cachexia to those who appeared on the pages of Bohemia, in that section they called “Of the Cuba of yesterday”, they became more visible, they grew in number. We Cubans are devastated, ready for the worst tribulations, all deluded with that nonsense that the people have power, when all they have is uncertainty, the same dilemma every day: What will I cook? What will I eat? Cubans know that fat is unhealthy, but so are starvation and hunger. And it is that eating could also be, parodying tango, a sensual pleasure.
Eating is living, but around here, cooking and eating is, rather, suffering; it is to resist hunger, that hunger which is one of the great evils of communism. And sadder will be our fainting from hunger, and worse still continue to confront the bulging roundness of some heads, governors and secretaries of the Communist Party, members of the National Assembly, the Council of State and the Central Committee of the Party. And we quiet, pleading dreamers reminding us of that verse by Neruda: “For now I only ask for justice for lunch”. But I also want something for the night, even if it is something frugal, something as simple as a glass of milk, and that the fat bosses do not appear in my dreams.
OPINION ARTICLE
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