(Editor’s Note: Catholic school lunches, Cuban sandwiches and arroz con mariscos, road trips with mom and dad…Enrique continues to dive into his childhood food memories. To return to the first part of Mi Paladar, click here. )
In my mind, I inherited a dichotomy that privileged Spanish over criollo cuisine, If I had to eat one national cuisine for the rest of my days, it would most likely be Spanish, though I would not grieve if it were French or Italian. And one period of my life would make me loathe Cuban food.
I'm a student at a Catholic school in Havana, where my parents have enrolled me both for its high academic reputation and for its inculcation of a solid religious foundation. The religion I take to quite readily; it suits my hypersensitive personality and uncertain hunger for transcendence, although later I would turn my back on the lies and hypocrisies that were part and parcel of that education. The high level of education is fine too, even though I'm not the best of students. What I can't stand is the food.
Unlike what I will encounter in the U.S., lunch in my home country is eaten at home. It is, in the European and Latin American traditions, the main meal of the day, sometimes followed by a siesta, and time is allotted for students - and adults with jobs - to go home for almuerzo. But there comes a time when my parents, who both work, do not have a way to get me home from school, which is not close to our apartment, and there is no one at home to fix it even if they could transport me there. So I become one of the students who must eat lunch at school. Must. It has a negative connotation, possibly economic - if one's parents had money they'd have someone at home to fix lunch, and, most importantly, a chauffeur to drive a student there.
A number of students are in my predicament and we all have lunch in the big school dining hall, along with the Christian Brothers, who are our teachers and run the school. The food consists mostly of Cuban dishes. And it's awful. For about half my life I could not eat a breaded cutlet, what we called bistec empanizado and today is often called milanesa, for it would remind me of those sorry days in the school dining hall. Yuca (cassava) with garlic sauce is a Cuban staple that my fellow countrymen salivate over. It makes me retch. I don't know whether the dishes, if well made, are that miserable; even though I am as down with chicken-fried steak as the most tried-and-true Texan, I cannot stand yuca, that disgustingly fibrous tuber.
Something about badly prepared Latin American food is revolting, something that is not true of American, which is, at its worst, bland and tasteless. Yet Latin American food surpasses that of its northern neighbor by its foregrounded flavors, what we call sabor, a word used to describe any phenomenon rich in sensuality, including sensuality itself. Lunch at my Christian Brothers food is not tasteless. It just tastes horrible. Sabor from Hell, in spite of the brothers' touted piety. Given how I will feel as an adult about the Church, perhaps that hellish sabor was a sign I was too young to interpret. That something was rotten in the Church of Rome.
I go without food. I eat the bread that is served and nothing else, for nothing else can get past my throat. I think my parents realize this at some point and figure that, since school lunch is not free, they're throwing away their money. Maybe I'm wasting away. At some point I'm rescued from this torment. But by then I have developed an antipathy toward much Cuban food.
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Though not all. I still like my mother's cooking, even if I'm not enthusiastic about her intense flavoring. I like my grandmother's bland versions of Cuban cooking. And I crave street food, but my parents, wisely no doubt, keep much of it from me. Joining my father on a visit to the Havana bus depot, where a friend from his childhood runs a travel agency that will arrange our first visit to the U.S., I pass the coffee shop and experience the temptation of Cuban butifarra. This is a rather vulgar fresh sausage in casing, not unlike the fat Italian sausage links and Argentine chorizos I will discover later, heavily flavored with garlic. The cooked link beckons me from a hot container, ready to be stuffed inside a roll and spiked with hot sauce. Its grossness hints subliminally of sexual pleasures, curiously not phallic in spite of its shape, but vulvic. As the heat bursts open the butifarra at each end, the aromatic meats spill out: Have me, Eat me. These are my later musings on the memory of the butifarra, but in the moment they are certainly there, even if not consciously; they account for something irresistible, and thanks to my father's interdiction, forbidden. A guilty pleasure I'm missing
There is one almost explicitly erotic food treat offered on the streets. On holidays and carnivals, whenever crowds of people gather, but also at the public parks any day, vendors wander around with baskets full of sandwiches for sale. The bread is an egg-colored roll and the filling is ham and cheese that has been strategically placed to give the impression of a sandwich so overstuffed its insides are spilling out. It's a trick, my parents tell me. Once you get the sandwich you learn there's practically nothing inside. Still, I want to try it, and like the sausage that will have undoubtedly sickened me - but not before pleasuring me - they forbid me from partaking
These are the teases of street food, veritable hookers showing me their wares, flaunting their nakedness before me. Except inside there will be nothing but disillusionment, while a real whore would deliver. There is a moral here but I don't know what it is. Other than that I can't get what I want. And what I want isn't there.
But plenty of other foodstuffs are fully there. It's hard for me to reconcile my childish fear of food, the flavors and textures that make me gag, with a passion for food - my grandmother's blood sausage stories, my lust for forbidden street food. What was I, a finicky eater or a petit gourmand? Both, it would seem. And, for the latter, I was in the right family.
My parents' experience with fancy food was limited. In their later years they would travel to France, and my mother would learn to deconstruct some of the more popular dishes she ate there, like onion soup and coq au vin, and approximate them at home. But in my childhood their tastes are Spanish and criollo, and they, we would go to great lengths to sample the right stuff.
Take a Cuban staple, the "mixed" sandwich, which I would learn to call a Cuban sandwich in Florida. There are a couple of places in the Old Havana of my childhood where it is the best. These are Spanish emporia specializing in the jamones and chorizos of the Old Country, as well as Spanish and Italian wines. We go there late at night - or it will seem very late to me - because these are simply the best sandwiches. In the memory of my palate, they still are.
A variety of meats, like in the Cuban sandwiches of Tampa, which are...what? I remember tasting ham and something tangier, chorizo, perhaps, or sobrasada, a Spanish cold cut similar to its Italian cognate, sopressata. Cheese definitely. On either pan de flauta - baguette - or pan de molde - the square white bread, which I actually prefer because its neutral flavor and texture do nothing but serve as a base for the meats and cheeses melding into one another inside the bread ends.
There is another classic Cuban sandwich, this one more criollo. Pan con lechón, a roast pork sandwich. We drive out of town for this one, to a community just outside Havana where, in the central plaza, a sandwich maker whom we know by no name other than el maestro sells them from a cart. Inside it there is a full fresh ham, cooked in the Cuban manner - first marinated in garlic, sour orange juice, and possibly herbs, then slow roasted. He slices it paper thin with a knife and layers the slices on crusty Cuban bread. The meat is touched with mojo de ajo, a sauce with the same ingredients as the marinade, topped with the other piece of bread and given to us. In Miami, I will look in vain for a pan con lechón that approximates this masterpiece, but never find it. I imagine the secrets to its flavors die with el maestro.
The Holy Grail of pork, in our pork-obsessed cuisine, is found a bit farther afield, in the neighboring province of Pinar del Río, home to the world's finest cigar tobacco, near a valley that will remain a tourist attraction, Vinales. As in my childhood, you drive to a lookout that provides a spectacular view of the Valle de Vinales, with its strange formations called mogotes, large cave-riddled mounds that rise from the valley floor and date back to some geographic prehistory when the whole place was the ocean floor.
Driving down to the valley floor, we seek out a place to feast on a local dish, smoked pork. These are big pork cuts, sometimes actually fresh hams that have been seasoned and then hung inside a smoke house to cook slowly. It's the wood that gives the meat its incomparable flavor, tropical wood that is like no other for roasting or barbecuing, But we do not go to the valley floor's famous restaurant, no sir, not my family of popular-Cuban-food snobs. That is for the tourists and we know better.
Instead, we drive to a nearby town, San Miguel de los Baños, thus named because there's a small but classy looking spa, in the original sense of the word. A place where one goes to take the waters, which are supposedly medicinal. Right across the road sits a rustic restaurant where they make the best puerco ahumado in all of Pinar del Río. According to my mother, they use only pork tenderloin. I do remember the pork bits getting their final touch over a coal fire right in front of the restaurant, which is what in Spanish is called a rancho, roofed but not walled, with the kind of hide-and-wood chairs that are typical in the Cuban countryside. The flavors, when I first taste them, are familiar: pork, garlic, smoke. But I have never tasted anything better and possibly never will.
Pastelitos. Flaky pastry individual pies are a Cuban classic of Spanish origin. Traditionally, we make them - or rather bakeries make them since the pastry is too difficult to handle at home-stuffed with guava, which all Cubans except myself adore, or with a ground meat mix that is common to empanadas all over Latin America but which Cubans also like without pastry, on top of white rice, calling it picadillo, a word that means mincemeat. Later in life I will find pastelitos de came too greasy, but as a child I love them. An undistinguished version is for sale during recreation period at my school and I devour them with glee, even if some snob-in- the-making in my palate tells me they're not very good. Most bakeries in Havana sell them, but, again, we drive to the one that makes the best, a bakery near the ornate Cementerio de Colón.
What makes them stand out? The mille-feuille pastry, no doubt. It's fresher, flakier, miraculously less greasy - or perhaps made with better quality shortening. The filling is generous - the pastelitos de carne at my school are stingy with their picadillo, which is also low quality. We get them fresh from the oven on Sunday after Mass, a food ritual that makes religious observation tolerable - perhaps I would be a practicing Catholic today if such treats were still available.
Like the puerco ahumado in San Miguel de los Baños and el maestro's pan con lechón, these meat pasties were the Platonic quintessence of pastelitos de carne, or if one is mate rialist, simply as good as it gets. My family's vernacular gourmandise rubs off on me. I will grow up to want only the best - the best common fare. In spite of a lifetime of going to restaurants, I will never be more than intellectually impressed by, say, molecular cuisine. But I will know which is the best taco truck in town, that no one can make a good traditional Cuban sandwich any more, and where I can have a dish that hits all the Proustian notes: arroz con mariscos.
It's a special occasion dish, for the seafood (mariscos) in it is expensive: lobster tail, crab claws, shrimp, clams, and chunks of snapper. Actually, arroz con pollo is the traditional special occasion dish, possibly the Cuban version of a “chicken in every pot." At least, that is what is served at the banquets I attend with my parents as a child, official dinners hosted by some organization or government department - my parents and a couple of my uncles work as civil servants. But arroz con mariscos ups the ante. And the feasts where it is served are just special dinners for a group of friends - it's a big dish so it requires more than a family to consume it - who have traveled to one of Cuba's seaside towns where the dish is famous.
There are some Havana restaurants that specialize in it, and when one time my father and his two brothers hold the winning ticket to the lottery, I insist that we celebrate at one of them so we can have arroz con mariscos - the winnings are modest by today's standards, but they pay off debts and allow down payments on modest homes. Most of the time, however, we have arroz con mariscos out of town. Where? Remedios, near my dad's hometown, not exactly on the ocean but on a river delta. Caibarién. Sagua la Grande. One beachside restaurant where we're part of a large party has a private dining room with big glass windows overlooking the sea. But it's not the setting I'm focusing on - it's the food.
Arroz con mariscos is basically what Spaniards call paella marinera - no chicken, pork, or chorizo, just seafood. The rice is yellow from saffron, though the traditional and less expensive way to color it in the Caribbean is with annatto. And the taste comes from three sources. One is a sofrito, the base of so much Spanish/Cuban cooking: onion, green pepper, garlic, and tomato sautéed, usually in olive oil, until the flavors meld. Of course, the mix of seafood, which, as in a bouillabaisse (add rice to this southern French dish and you have an arroz con mariscos), combine to create one distinct flavor. And the fresh fish broth in which the rice cooks. Though I love lobster and crab, the best part of an arroz con mariscos for me is the arroz. All of those ingredients have combined to flavor the rice, which is always the short-grain Valencia strain. My special treat is to dig into an opened clam, not to get at the clam itself, which of course I eat, but at the rice, which has not only synthesized the many tastes of the dish but is now spiked with the juice that the clam releases as it cooks and opens. I don't know if shellfish is an aphrodisiac, as folklore claims, but the rice inside the clam excites my palate into a state of voluptuous pleasure.
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My parents love road trips. One weekend we go in a caravan with another family from my dad's work, toward the westem end of the island. The long island is traversed by a two-lane highway, the Carretera Central, a government project begun in the late '20s. We drive as far west as the road will go and from there we continue in open fishing boats down a dark river toward our destination, at the very tip of the island. But it's not the river trip I recall most vividly. It's our stop that night at a guest house at the end of our river trip and our dinner of fried chicken.
It arrives, piled high in a large serving dish. Chicken cut up into legs and thighs and breasts and wings. The smallest such chicken pieces I've seen. I'm sure the chicken breed have been the classic garlic and sour-orange marinade that Cubans use for all meats. Fried in what? Lard? That too is classic, but I have no idea. It will remain the best chicken I've ever tasted, in Cuba, in the U.S., in Spain, in France, anywhere. The fried chicken at the end of the island.
Some of our trips are minor and have one purpose, which as soon as we move to the U.S. will become commonplace. A cookout. "Barbecue," pronounced with a heavy Cuban accent, will become a favorite activity of Cuban-Americans, one aspect of American life they will take to with great enthusiasm. Come over, Sunday, we will tell one another. Voy a hacer un barbiquiú.
Historically, it's fitting. The English word comes from the Spanish barbacoa, which is how the conquistadores pronounced a native word that meant "sacred fire" used by the Taino people of my native Cuba and other Caribbean islands. Still, in '50s Cuba, the word and the practice are unknown.
Not that there is no outdoor cooking. On the contrary Possibly maintaining the Taino tradition, or perhaps because all people cook outdoors, country people roast pork outdoors - in the provinces most folks don't have ovens, nor would a whole pig fit in one if they did. The technique, which might come from the original barbacoa, is to get two fires going In one, wood is burned down to charcoal. In the other, that smoldering charcoal is set and the pig is laid over it on a grill or impaled on a stick that is hand rotated over the low heat. Ideally, guava leaves are laid over the coals, so the oils released by the heat will permeate the meat. Our system, when we drive to the countryside to cook out, is simpler, downright primitive.
First of all, there are no big parks, as we will find in the States, most of them outfitted with grills for public use. We just drive down country roads until we find a pleasant spot. We park and walk in, basically trespassing, though that thought does not even occur to my family. There my father sets to building the rustic rotisserie, driving two firm sticks into the ground and finding another one to skewer the meat The latter is usually whole chickens, which my mother has marinated in sour-orange juice, garlic, onions, and herbs. My sister and I wander about looking for sticks for the fire. My father lights them with some effort - there is no such thing as charcoal lighter fluid - and when the fire's going we begin taking turns rotating the chicken.
It tastes marvelous. A few years later we will be living in Florida and cooking out on a grill fired with charcoal. But the flavor will pale. Cuban chickens? Perhaps, though more likely it's the wood that makes the difference. Tropical wood is full of pungent aromatic oils, and the random mix of sticks we've gathered creates a singular flavor with its smoke. It is one of the many ways in which our life will change. Cooking out - barbiquiú - will be easier. The taste will be less interesting
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Sabor: taste/flavor. In my first culture, where I still live in many ways in spite of immigration, the word is used frequently. No tiene sabor can be used to describe anything from food to personality. To have sabor is to be rico. Rich, but never in a monetary way. And not in the English-language usage either, where the word, responding to what I extrapolate as the influence of Puritanism on the English palate, can be pejorative: Rich food means too heavily seasoned or too fatty or simply not good for you. It's a case of an untrue cognate. Rico is never too anything. And it's definitely good for you. Ay que rico! is an exclamation of approval and joy. And they are the words most heard in bed, if one can muster language beyond moaning. But even before intimacy there are judgments based on sabor. Un huevo sin sal - an egg without salt - is a person without any charm, or to translate at a culinary level, without piquancy. It's telling that it would be a gastronomic error, perhaps even an offense, to consume an egg that has not been salted. Though Americans are great salt consumers - not to mention pepper, which I never saw at a table in my Cuban childhood - the cult of natural flavor in food, taken to religious heights by the health-food movement and more recently by its sybaritic offspring, the locavore scene, runs counter to the cult of sabor.
Paradoxically. For the natural foodstuffs of my childhood are full of sabor, like the incredible fried chicken in that small-town boarding house in the province of Pinar del Río, which though marinated and seasoned owed much of its flavor to the breed. In fact, the foodstuffs of my childhood often come in two versions: American and criollo. American versions, a recent introduction, are items like iceberg lettuce. Criollo lettuce is what Americans call Boston. American chickens are white-fleshed and bland-flavored. Criollo chicken is yellow-fleshed, due to a diet of corn, as well as what the chicken could find in the yard since this bird was "free range." And, my maternal grandmother warns me, one must be wary, for the inferior - as far as she is concerned--American chicken might be soaked in an annatto wash to color its flesh yellow and be sold as criollo. Now here's a rich twist on racial passing. It's the pale flesh from the white continent to our north that signals an inferior breed; the colored flesh of our Latin Caribbean signals a verifiable superiority. Sabor
As in so many things, my grandmother is right. I will learn about the infernal practice of industrial chicken breeding, And I will pay extra bucks for free-range chicken, even more if the bird is also organic. I will one day pay a premium for chicken that resembles in some way what we underdeveloped Cubans raise in our farmyards and cook in our kitchens, even as supermarkets and American imports encroach on our culinary world, harbingers of the passage north many of us will make. We are getting a preview of the American way of life to come. And we don't know that what we call criollo we will later hear called words like sustainable.
My palate continued its journey on parallel tracks: the pursuit of criollo or Spanish authenticity, the infatuation with all things American. Toward the end of my life in Cuba, pushing thirteen, just as we are going through the process of applying for resident visas, I find another American food that I will continue to indulge in all my life, but only after the hardship of our first years in Florida, only when we can afford it. Steak
Cuban bistec - Hispanicization of the word "beefsteak” - is thin and boneless. The most desirable cut is palomilla, which in Miami supermarkets and restaurants that cater to the big Cuban community is sirloin. There is already a cult of filet mignon. My mother makes it a couple of times, tenderloin wrapped in bacon she overcooks in a wine sauce - in the States she will learn the error of her ways, cook it rare and forgo the sauce. But I've never tasted an American cut. After a trip to the American embassy, possibly to deliver some documents for our visa application, I go with my father and one of his friends to a nearby American-style steakhouse. For the first time in my life I have a T-bone. I commit the gaucherie of slathering it with bottled steak sauce because this too is a novelty. In fact, I recall feeling that I should enjoy the sauce because it's so American but I truly don't. It's too sweet and, though I cannot articulate this yet, it fights with the natural juices of the T-bone.
There are two exceptions to my Yankeephilia and they have to do with cloying sweetness. I don't like catsup -- my sister puts it on everything. And I don't like cola. Desperate to embrace this widely loved American flavor, I try Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, RC Cola. I just don't like it. I never will, nor will I understand how an empire, one that would one day be run by a Cuban-American, Roberto Goizueta, could be built on this medicinal flavor.
The steak, in spite of my abuse, is wonderful. I already like my palomilla pink and juicy, so I make sure my T-bone is cooked no more than medium, perhaps medium rare. It's that "natural beef" flavor my friend's father had recommended in American hamburger, but better. Something primal happens when I taste this tender, bloody beef. Some ancient carnivorous instinct is stimulated; one that I will discover drives countless American men to light up charcoal in their backyards and grill, grill, grill. The smoky aroma, like what I tasted in the wonderful puerco ahumado next to the Viñales valley, is there; it complements the beef juices. I am discovering my caveman roots. And I am moving to Holy Caveman Land. It will be years before I can afford to walk into the peerless Bern's Steakhouse in Tampa and order a rare chateaubriand, but steak begins here. Right before the journey.
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Our life accelerates toward our emigration, even as, I am realizing, life is getting sweeter and sweeter. Not only do I get to experience American food and movies and music and amusement parks, but in the apartments where we live in Vedado, I make friends and I get crushes on girls. My heart breaks because my crushes are unrequited, but no matter, there are all those new American songs I sing to myself to express these new feelings, which I just know can only be expressed in English. I must be growing because I do notice some girls smiling at me more than I'd expect. I get the feeling anything might be possible. But the clock is ticking, We're leaving,
On December 24, 1956, my family joins the family of my father's married uncle at the home of his single one, the one I will one day leam is gay, who lives with my grandmother. They have bought a condo - a very new idea - in a recently developed section of town. It's on the bank of the Almendares River and only a block away there's a marvel of urbanism, a tunnel that lets cars drive under the river. We all have dinner at my uncle's apartment, my last Christmas Eve in Havana. My mother has roasted a turkey, which she has stuffed with meats, nuts, and raisins, in the Spanish manner. My married uncle has brought a roast suckling pig. There are black beans and rice, I'm sure, and a Christmas salad-possibly out of an American cookbook - my own father makes, with pimiento strips and chunks of pineapple. There have been almonds and walnuts and filberts to crack, a Spanish tradition, as are the turrones, almond nougats imported from Spain that are staples of a Christmas Eve menu. It's all very jolly, though I think also a little sad.
After dinner I go for a walk. Alone? I can't remember, perhaps with a cousin. I wander a few blocks away where a new deluxe apartment building has just been erected, along with cafés and newspaper shops and a few other amenities. It all reeks of modernity and promise. All of Havana does to me, even though there's political violence. This is the best life, I think. And what I don't know is that this is the American dream, filtered through my own culture's rose-tinted lenses to produce a lifestyle that is sweeter, dreamier than anything the real U.S. will ever give me. Suddenly, I have regrets. Maybe this move north is not such a great idea. Maybe we are not going to the Promised Land. Given the hardships we will endure, the loneliness I am about to feel the pain my family will traverse, this moment of regret over a decision too late to change feels like a premonition. And so it might forever feel, were it not for the travails and pain my entire nation will endure over the coming decades, to this day. Still, some part of me believes that this is as good as it gets.
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My childhood Havana has its culinary curios - and isn't everything a curio to a child? In the commercial center one coffee shop sells these little sandwiches called "little ducks," its refrigerated container adorned with drawings of Huey, Louie, and Dewey. They are, as far as I can tell, tiny buns, like the ones I find at birthday parties, smeared with a paste of cream cheese, pimiento, and deviled ham. I find them irresistible. Another treat, one that will make its way to Miami, is the “prepared cracker," the makings of a Cuban sandwich -roast pork, ham and swiss cheese--inside two saltine crackers instead of bread. That the saltines will fall apart with the first bite is not a concern. In fact, the galletica preparada is the runt of the Cuban sandwich litter, a snack really. Next up would be a bocadito, "little mouthful," ergo a snack, which is the sandwich made with square white bread. Finally the sandwich, often called sanwiche, in proper baguette bread and larger in size. Not too large - in exile all of these will become gargantuan.
Batidos are shakes, made from one of our cornucopias of tropical fruits, but no ice cream - American-style coffee shops like Woolworth's serve milk shakes and malts. Ice cones are sold from street carts, the ice shaved by hand and topped with syrups of unnatural colors and flavors - the contradiction of a tropical land rich in sweet fruits where ice cones are juiced with synthetic flavors will come to me much later in life. Coffee is everywhere - another item that emigrated energetically. I don't know when Italian espresso machines came to Havana for I don't remember a time when they weren't there, those big machines whose function was to distill a mere thimbleful of brew. At home, families drip their coffee through cloth, still as strong as espresso but not foamy. Traditionally, and especially in the countryside, Cubans begin their day with black sugar-sweetened (always) coffee as soon as they awake. Then they will move to the table where café con leche is served in big cups, the milk boiled with a dash of salt. And Cuban bread smeared with butter, known simply as pan con mantequila (bread with butter), though in exile it will become "Cuban toast."
The city is filled with espresso stands, some at coffee shops, some freestanding on the sidewalk. A demitasse is five cents, though in working-class neighborhoods it's as cheap as two cents. That's for the men, for it's an exclusively male ritual to stand-never sit-drinking coffee, black with lots of sugar. Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante deconstructed the ritual in one of his books, pointing out how a man will lean forward so the coffee won't drip on his white linen suit or guayabera shirt, and, if wearing a suit, with his hand on his chest to push his tie back and not get coffee stains on it. To this day, even in jeans and T-shirt, I stand that way to drink coffee.
My strongest olfactory memory of Havana is not brewed coffee, however, but freshly roasted beans. To augment our family's income, my father has a number of clients whose books he keeps for tax-paying purposes. One is a coffee manufacturer. I accompany him in his work-related visits, and the most memorable is to the coffee company. To get to the office we have to walk through the warehouse. It's there that I'm overwhelmed by the aroma of roasted coffee beans. Coffee and tobacco are two scents of my childhood that I find irresistible, even though I seldom consume the latter, mostly because the smoke I suck into my palate pales in comparison to the rich pungency of an unlit Havana. Coffee too smells better before brewing yet, I am a coffee junkie, one who has kicked the habit a handful of times just to prove to myself that I am free of any dependency, and then have gone back to it because I've thought, what the hell, it's a vice but I love it.
The other scent associated with my homeland is molasses, the rich concentrated essence of the juice extracted from sugarcane. In my childhood, upon approaching a sugar mill, I am enveloped by molasses vapor. Some find this aroma nauseating, and I can see why. Like any industrial smell, such as the effluvia of a paper mill, the even grosser one from a soap factory I remember sniffing as a kid, or even something I love, chocolate, which on a visit to Hershey, Pennsylvania, I find clinging to the air of the entire town and sends me running from it, these powerful odors can be hard to bear. Yet, the molasses air emanating from a sugar mill delights my nose.
Even though popular lore links rum to tobacco and coffee as quintessential Cuban olfactory pleasures, I don't make the rum association. Too much rum reeks of the oak barrels in which it is aged, but some brands have managed to retain the whiff of molasses, and these are my favorites for drinking on the rocks with only a squirt of lime.
These Cuban-though also Spanish-aromas will remain stuck in my olfactory memory as the ones that give pleasure Nothing original here. There is an entire lore, used generously in advertising, of rich, dark scents: leather, coffee, tobacco, molasses, smoke. Masculine scents, supposedly. I wouldn't know what it's like to have a woman's nose, though I suspect that it works the same and that these associations are culturally, not genetically, determined. What I do know is that they punch my pleasure buttons.
In Tristana, an adaptation of a nineteenth-century novel by the great Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, the protagonist is having hot chocolate and pastries with friends at home. As he pours the chocolate, which is the typical Spanish beverage that is so thick it's practically hot mousse, he can't help but feel sorry for those unfortunate people who must console themselves with tea.
This very Spanish dig at the English is something a Latin American marooned in Anglo America can relate to. But there's more. Culturally embedded as the chocolate/tea dialectic is, there is no question in the radicalism of the opposition. Chocolate is dark, tea is light. Chocolate, particularly Spanish chocolate, is thick; tea is thin. And chocolate offers a deep rich aroma and taste, while tea's notes are subtle and nuanced. One is tempted to go further, though in a very primitive and native simulacrum of anthropology. Tea is Asian and Asians are, as the cliché goes, subtle. Chocolate, the xocoatl of the Aztecs, is quintessentially American, and the New World is savage to the point of eroticism. (Having admitted the naiveté of the exercise, I will allow that the Aztecs, like all New World peoples, were descended from Asians who crossed the frozen Bering Straits.) One thing I can assert boldly about my taste for bold tastes, from the perspective of a New World person of Spanish blood, is that chocolate, like all Spanish - Hispanic, in the original sense of the word - predilections, is not subtle. Granted, there are great chocolates made from great cacaos, from the plantations of the Gran Cacaos, as that Venezuelan oligarchy is called, just like there are as many notes to be discerned by cigar aficionados as there are in wines degusted by wine advocates. But, in truth, chocolate, coffee, cigars, these are aromas and flavors that knock your socks off, something that is seldom if ever said of tea.
I am a young male of my circumstances. I am a Caribbean Hispanic from the region's largest island, from a culture that privileges bold, macho sensations: cigars wrapped in leaf the wondrous color of a black woman's soft skin; añejo rum drunk straight; heavily sweetened, dark-roasted coffee; thick, creamy Spanish chocolate; burnt-sugar topped natillas spiked with cinnamon; brown crackling skin pulled off a suckling pig that has been marinated in sour-oranges and garlic and roasted over tropical wood coals topped with guava leaves.
I'm moving to a land where berries are blue.
