Trials and tribulations of Cuban food

With the days of rations and food shortages a not-too-distant memory, the government still exerts control over the food chain. As well as owning all farming co-operatives, there are also state-controlled restaurants with set dishes and prices complete with indifferent wait staff clad in regulation black and white uniforms. Beef can only be served in these government restaurants as all cows are state-controlled.

Our experiences with these restaurants (and I use that term loosely) have been, for the most part, hilarious. We turned up to one only to find the menu being completely different (an unaffordable) from the one advertised outside. At others, we have tried to order food off a menu where 90 per cent of the food was unavailable.

Restaurant menus have their fair share of hilarious poorly-translated English. We nearly ordered a prawn dish with “optional extra pricking” just to see what we would be given. Equally interesting was a dish named “whimsical seafood,” which turned out to be skewers of prawn and pork meat hung from a metal frame on a bed of salad.

Reads: one of the most noble ways to serve the party is work!

At the state-sponsored El Rapido, Cuba’s answer to McDonalds, the only “foods” available were rock-hard pre-cooked chicken drumsticks or limp bread rolls stuffed with processed sausage meat. Everything was heated up in the microwave by the incompetent staff that seemed to be unable to open the microwave door without it falling completely off its hinges. In a moment reminiscent of a Fawlty Towers episode, three staff members struggled to re-attach the microwave door, only to realise they were attempting to affix it upside-down!

Finding a decent meal can be difficult here, but some family-run paladares, which have been legal since 1995, are managing to survive in the face of these terrible government-sponsored fast food joints. Some of these places make really nice food, where there is more than fried chicken and sloppy pizza to choose from and dishes actually come with real salad and vegetables.

Vegetarians would starve here, as menus almost entirely revolve around meat. Most dishes, if they’re not pizza or a ham and cheese sandwich, involve a hunk of grilled or fried meat, congri - rice cooked with beans, a “salad” of shredded cabbage, a limp lettuce leaf and shavings of carrot, and sometimes fried bananas that look and taste like soggy potato chips.

Trying to self-cater to save money or avoid fried food is an exercise in futility. Cuban grocery stores, especially in touristy areas, don’t sell much food that you can use in a sandwich, salad or other meal that you can put together yourself without cooking. And with accommodation owners trying to get you to pay for breakfast and dinner, its not as if they are going to throw open the doors to their kitchen and let you cook your own food.

After several attempts to find something to put in a sandwich, we eventually found tinned tuna, although one can cost more than a flimsy ham roll or hamburger or piece of fried chicken at a government cafeteria. No shops sold, fruit, cheese, milk or bread, they were sometimes sold at bakeries, dairies or on street corners. At the bakery, bread is only available at certain times of day, and prices seem to change depending on when we bought it.

Agriculture collective fruit distributor

Most of the food we ate in Cuba was pretty average, plain and had no discernable sauces or spices but we did get lucky a few times. The best meals we ate were usually dinners cooked by the accommodation owners – a standout was this incredible four-course meal with lobster tails in tomato salsa as the main dish in the place where we stayed in Trinidad.

Our experience one night in Havana quite sums up the food situation in Cuba. Havana has four Spanish clubs which are supposed to have good, relatively cheap food. There was a massive queue and an hour’s wait outside the first one we tried, but one of the hosts at the door gave us a card for another restaurant a few blocks away.

Of course, this proved to be a ruse. The average price of a dish on the menu was $15-17, about three or four times what other places charge. We walked out, and headed to another Spanish club. This one seemed perfect – reasonably diverse menu, good prices – lobster for $5 – and a band was about to start playing.

We ordered paella, but were told it wasn’t available. We then asked for lobster, prawns, chicken. It turned out that the entire menu was a mirage, except for two stodgy pork dishes!

Finally we found a family run paladar restaurant nearby that served up generous portions of chicken and pork staples with fried banana, cassava and rice. Sometimes it was difficult to find a square meal that wasn’t fried, microwaved or ridiculously overpriced!