Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (free biff chip and kipper ebooks txt) 📗

lobby for Cuban-American trade, or advocate the cause of some Cuban shortstop unfairly denied the right to earn $7 million a year in the Major Leagues. Traveling in this manner meant nobody was around to prevent me from asking impoverished Cubans how they felt about the glorious times tourists like me were having while they barely exist on rationed staples, no luxuries, and salaries averaging $10 a month.

I heard the same word over and over again. Whenever I asked for an explanation of the appalling inequities in their so-called workers’ paradise, Cubans would offer a one-word explanation: “contradictions.” It is F O R K I T O V E R

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the standard explanation for everything incomprehensible about Cuba.

Why does Fidel Castro have a reported fifty-seven homes in a country with intolerable housing shortages? “Contradictions.” Why does a country with more doctors per capita than anywhere else on earth have no aspirin? “Contradictions.” Even highly educated professionals accept this excuse. Whenever the word is spoken, it is expressed with a shrug, much like a medieval peasant blaming a famine on “God’s will.” When everything in life is controlled by a supreme being—in Cuba, Castro is referred to as El Commandante—much forbearance is required of the populace.

Shabbily treated they may be, but no Cuban I met expressed unqualified admiration for the United States. I spoke to a professor, a teacher, an economist, and a researcher. Each one of them, at some time in our conversation, ceased being amiable long enough to protest the U.S. embargo of Cuba, which has been in effect for thirty-seven years and has accomplished little politically but caused incalculable dam-age economically. It is at least as responsible as Castro’s inflexibility for the hardships that the Cuban people endure.

I arrived in Cuba expecting to find desperation. I came away awed by the patience and loyalty of an incredibly stressed populace. I thought Nilsa epitomized the stoicism of the typical Cuban. After I read her a list of everything I’d eaten from the breakfast buffet of the Melia Cohiba Hotel, she laughed without envy and said, “For me that is food for fifteen or twenty days.” We talked about life in America. I told her that while she would have no difficulty eating well in America, her housing conditions would almost certainly decline were she to leave Havana for an apartment in New York or Miami. The small detached paint-peeling two-bedroom Spanish-style bungalow she owns was built in the 1950s in what was then a middle-class section of Havana. She has one semifunctional bathroom (fixing the toilet would cost about three dollars, which she does not have), a nonfunctional Russian TV, a megalithic Frigidaire she described as “bellisimo,” cracks in the walls and ceilings, and a pump to deliver water from the street to her cistern.

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A L A N R I C H M A N

Even though she considered my tales of less-than-commodious living in America far-fetched, she insisted that she is not one of those who think the streets are paved in gold. Nodding in the direction of a cousin who walked into her house without a greeting and started making telephone calls without asking, she said, “He is one of those who think when they arrive in the United States they will pick dollar bills from the trees.”

Havana, once magnificent, now crumbling, has become Pompeii with people. Little of the city as it appeared in the early twentieth century remains intact, although the remnants of a city of taste and culture are stunning. So many of the stucco buildings, their pastel colors leached out, their exteriors crumbling, look like scratching posts for giant cats.

Wrought-iron balconies are rusted husks. In Old Havana, eighteenth-century palaces constructed with twelve-foot ceilings have been recon-figured into twentieth-century slums with six-foot ceilings, providing twice as many floors for the impoverished to reside.

Whenever I met a Cuban citizen, I had a single goal: to try to com-prehend what makes life in Havana not only bearable but, to many, defensible. A Socialist utopia Havana is not. The average citizen has insufficient food, little or no access to everyday necessities such as vita-mins and toothpaste, minimum clothing, inadequate public transportation, no freedom of speech, genuine fear of tyrannical and arbitrary punishment, and a knowledge that life under Marxism has gotten pro-gressively worse since the breakup of the Soviet Union (and the loss of its estimated annual subsidy of $5 billion to 7 billion). Yet of those I interviewed, only the medical-school professor sounded disillusioned.

He told me that Cuba was close to a “social explosion” and only Castro’s charisma was keeping the country together.

What Cuba does offer its citizens, in abundance, is education and health care (although the redirection of medical supplies to dollar-paying foreign patients may be eroding even that). Those benefits, along with a profusion of paramilitary police on street corners, have helped save Cuba from stumbling into a kind of Mad Max, postapocalyptic F O R K I T O V E R

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state, although there are signs that even the steadfast intellectuals who have been at the core of Castro’s support are becoming weary. A seventy-year-old retired economist, a man who worked so tirelessly for the revolution in the sixties that it broke up his marriage, told me this joke:

“A Cuban went to the U.S. and asked for political asylum. He was interviewed and proudly said that one of the achievements of the revolution was free health care and free education, the best in the world.

He was asked, ‘If it’s such a great country, why are you leaving?’ The Cuban replied, ‘Because you are not always sick or studying.’ ” There are few luxuries remaining in Havana, and none I came across that was equally accessible to tourists and citizens. In a mid-city park devoted entirely to the consumption of ice cream, tourists need not wait for their dollar-denominated sundaes, while Cubans stand in lines of more than two