Cuban Wit Feeds Families in Cash Crisis

Behind the walls of a dilapidated mansion, a family illegally raises a pig in the bathtub for a New Year’s Day feast. To prevent betrayal, its vocal cords have been cut.

“It’s big, but skinny,” said a neighbor, Lucia, grinning as she passed the house in what used to be one of Havana’s elegant neighborhoods. “They don’t think it will last until December.”

As the nation’s economic crisis deepens and the shelves of government stores become barer, Cubans grow more adept at devising ways to feed themselves.

Lucia, a 54-year-old schoolteacher, makes her own wine in a big glass jar with fruit juice, water and yeast.

“It’s not very good, but it’s better than nothing,” she said. Like others, Lucia asked that her last name not be used for fear of government retribution.

A common meat substitute is grapefruit steak, a citrus slice seasoned with salt and pepper and fried.

That is among the preparations Nitza Villapol demonstrates on her television cooking show, “Cocina al Minuto” (Cooking in a Minute). When potatoes were plentiful, all her main dishes use them.

Nearly everyone breaks the law by purchasing stolen or illegally imported food on the thriving black market.

“See those bananas?” Lucia said, pointing to a large, green bunch in her kitchen. “I got those on the black market, and those potatoes and oranges, too.”

Putting food on the table has never been easy in Communist Cuba, where rationing and long lines became a way of life.

But Cubans say it has never been as hard as now, under wartime-like measures known as “the special period in time of peace.” About the only food they can depend on is the ice cream at the popular Coppelia parlors, Cuba’s culinary pride.

After communism collapsed in the Soviet bloc, Cuba lost up to 85% of its former trade, including most imports of processed food and petroleum. Trade is limited further by a 30-year-old U.S. embargo, recently tightened to put political pressure on President Fidel Castro.

Bread, once plentiful, is now rationed--one roll a day per person.

Fresh fruits and vegetables are so scarce that anyone who finds a few bananas or papayas is the object of envy. Canned meat from Russia and fresh chickens and canned vegetables from Bulgaria, once common, have disappeared.

Lighting is dim inside one government food store, built by an American grocery chain before Castro’s revolution in 1959.

“They are saving on petroleum” explained Maria, a woman in her 60s who guided a reporter through several markets.

Instead of aisles, there are six islands where families buy rationed goods: rice, sugar, beans, plastic bags of coffee, eggs, evaporated milk, canned tomatoes, jars of baby food, tubes of toothpaste, bars of gray-green soap.

For each item, the shopper pays a relatively small amount: about $1.50 for five pounds of rice and 65 cents for toothpaste. The woman behind the counter marks off each item in the shopper’s ration book, or “libreta.”

Before the crisis, Cubans could usually get the items listed in their ration books, plus numerous others that were not rationed, Maria said. Now, many rationed items are seldom or never available.

“It is a daily fight to feed your family,” she said.

This day, there is no fresh milk or cheese, no fresh meat except for the hated “picadillo” of 30% ground beef and 70% soybean meal. There is fresh fish, though, and about a dozen people line up for it.

Well-stocked “diplotiendas,” the dollar stores for foreigners and high Communist Party officials, are a sharp contrast to government markets. The largest one rivals any American supermarket, with items ranging from electronics equipment and clothing to fresh, canned and packaged food.

Many Cubans yearn for the return of farmers’ markets, which thrived until the government closed them in 1986 amid complaints that middlemen were making huge profits.