The street is Carlos III, in Havana; the place, a slum that is half winery and half timbiriche, could be in any town on the island. There is a queue in front of the door of the establishment. On its members, listless, reverberates the midday sun of Havana.
With the parsimony of someone who has the whole day ahead of him, the vendor puts on an apron and grabs a palette. He is a tall, sweaty mulatto, for whom washing his hands before handling food is either a formality or nonsense.
“Let’s go,” he says under his breath to the first customer, who opens the mouth of his crate, just as squeezed and hungry as he is. The store is mixed, which means that on its shelves there are – when there are – plastic pots, kitchen instruments that will not last more than a week, thick strainers and dull knives, but also some canned goods that appear or products shipped in bulk , like the one that now summons the queue.
Most know what is coming, but no one calibrates it well until they see it, smell it and feel its texture: a mincemeat –to use a name– with an almost liquid consistency, a vomit-like color and an odor as nauseating as the rest of the street, at 65 pesos a pound.
A distracted person makes the mistake of paying before receiving his product, opens his bag and prepares to receive it. He can’t hide his disgust, which turns his stomach and almost forces him to utter an expletive. “What’s going on?” Asks the mulatto, while he stirs the mixture slightly, puts his hand into the bucket without worrying about the mud, and takes out a mouthful of watery hash.
#Video Liquid chicken mincemeat in Havana, for “only” 65 pesos? A nauseating product was on sale this Friday in a store on Carlos III street https://t.co/g5TJ1vLnUl pic.twitter.com/2V9tHx0avf
— 14ymedio (@14ymedio) September 2, 2022
“Nothing,” says the boy, approaching the crate with resignation, “throw pa’ there”.
“They mix it with water to lengthen it,” explains an old man who is also queuing, “that way they earn a little more.” “I remember a hogwash like this that they sold in the Special Period,” says another, “and that they presented as goose paste. The goose is a bird related to the guanajo, ask your grandparents,” he clarifies, laughing at his own occurrence. .
Next to the bucket of picadillo is a can advertised as tomato paste. “No one buys it anymore, because people know what they are making it with,” says one woman. “Haven’t you seen the videos on the networks? They put the same guava, banana, peel of anything: but it’s not a tomato.”
After the stench of ground beef, what you can breathe in the air is the sweet aroma of syrup and the bad smell that permeates Cuban soup kitchens. The neighbors know that it is the same syrup that they make in a factory on that same block, sold not only in the mulatto’s timbiriche but also by the procession of elderly people and beggars of Carlos III.
Well packed in the backpack, it will be up to Cuban mothers and fathers, armed with their arsenal of tricks, to diagnose which is the most convenient method to cook mincemeat.
Well packed in the backpack, it will be up to Cuban mothers and fathers, armed with their arsenal of tricks, to diagnose which is the most convenient method to cook mincemeat
None of this is known, however, by the always optimistic newspaper of the Party. As if describing paradise, Granma this Friday banishes any fear of the readers: they are promised, perhaps on time, “deliveries of rice, beans, sugar, salt and oil”, in addition to eggs, coffee and the occasional pack of cigarettes.
“It’s guaranteed” – the newspaper’s favorite word – “milk for children, diets for pregnant women and chronic childhood illnesses, and in a group of territories the consumption of fluid milk is supported.”
For those who enjoy a good bath after preparing a banquet with the standardized ingredients, there will be a good “toilet soap by composition of nuclei, bimonthly toothpaste and laundry soap.”
Of course, Granma It is not unaware that the greatest terror of the population is the scarcity of flour, for which it guarantees –once again the term– the necessary for “the bread of the family basket”. Of course, it is not responsible for the “shifts in the sales hours due to the affectation of the electric power or the transportation of the raw material”.
The Cuban who arrives home with the “merchandise” dispatched by the mulatto warehouseman and reads this article from the official organ of the Communist Party will inevitably have to smile: if he had known that everything –breakfast, lunch and dinner– was guaranteed, he would not I would have wasted 65 pesos on Carlos III’s filthy mincemeat.
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