Subsistence

Subsistence

When I'm in Cuba, I spend most of my time in Havana, a city of more than two million people. Havana in 1958 was a modern, tourist-oriented capital city, and while it has suffered from a severe case of deferred maintenance since then, it is still like lots of other places in the world, albeit the worse for wear. But you can have a different view of Cuba if you venture into the rural areas.

I haven't seen eastern Cuba, but I have traveled a little into the western part of the island. This month we briefly visited Pinar del Rio and Viñales, a long drive from Havana. Our visit to a farm was worth discussion in these blogs.

We were near Viñales, famous for its loaf-of-bread shaped mountains (called "mogotes") and flat valley floors, giving the place an other-world flavor. One might expect a hilly transition between flat ground and mountains, but not here. The mountains have nearly vertical walls which pretty well prevent people from living on them. You find the people, instead, on the flat valley floors, and such was the setting for the farm we visited.

You'd be correct in calling it a subsistence farm, and it was difficult to imagine a whole family making its living on this barren land. We stopped the van on a deserted road, and saw the driveway curving up toward the small house in the distance. The driveway was too rough, so we got out of the van and walked toward the house. The bare ground of the driveway looked like the red earth of Georgia, but slightly darker.

The house may have had two rooms and a little front porch. There were a couple of sheds but no barn. Our driver had stopped here before, and he greeted the farmer. As they talked in rapid-fire, highly accented Spanish that I couldn't hope to understand, the rest of us walked around to see what kind of place this was. The wife (or possibly a daughter) was sitting on the front porch, nursing a baby, and several skinny little dogs milled around sniffing and scratching.

I discovered a large pot (more like a cauldron) sitting on a log fire behind the house. It's contents were boiling, and a burlap bag floated on the surface of the liquid in the pot. I puzzled over the burlap, and finally decided it was to suppress foaming. When I saw it, I didn't know what was cooking, but whatever it was, it was too much to be intended for the few people living in the house. It was clearly a farm product meant to be sold.

That guess proved to be right when I was told it was hot sauce, and then I saw a large carton of bottles of hot sauce filled, capped, and waiting to be sold or shipped to the city. We were told the farmer was certified by the government to bottle and sell his product.

Nora and the driver each bought several bottles of the hot sauce to take back to the city. That's the way lots of farm products make their ways to the dinner tables in Cuba. City dwellers, on trips to the country, buy farm products and take them back to give or sell to friends and relatives or possibly to be sold in the many little food stands you find in Havana. Nora and the driver were functioning as part of Havana's food supply system.

But Nora had a larger interest—the little dogs roaming about. She discovered there was no water bowl set out for them, and she told the farmer of her work in animal protection and gave a little lecture on always having water for them. She asked and got permission to treat the little dogs for parasites, and soon she was digging in her large bag for a syringe and a vial of medicine. Every dog got a dose of the medicine.

Nora and our driver bought another box of melanga root, a tough brown root that looks like something that would grow in a desert. Well, In this dry, dusty place, "desert" was a good word for the surroundings. Melanga can be peeled, fried, boiled into soup or stewed. It's a starchy, high-calorie standard part of the Cuban diet with a nut-like flavor. Once again, Nora and our driver were part of the food supply chain for Havana.

I told Charlene that I had never been on a farm so primitive before. There was no electricity, telephone, air-conditioning, or television. She said, "You haven't seen all of Kentucky, then." Well, not to be argumentative but I've seen a lot of Kentucky, and this little farm in Viñales, with strange shaped mountains in the distance was in a class by itself.

Les Inglis