In case you’re wondering how Anita Snow is doing eating like a Cuban for month, she’s blogging it.
Here’s a few excerpts:
HAVANA (AP) — I’m starting to get obsessed with food.
Usually when I don’t have time to shop and cook, I’ll just go to restaurants, like most other foreigners do in Cuba.
But getting your food, preparing it and keeping track of what you spend to remain on budget as most Cubans must do is like having another full-time job.
I don’t know how average Cubans do it, unless they live in walking distance to a farmers markets. Most Havana residents have some kind of produce stand within walking distance, but those small stands don’t always have much selection.
My produce won’t last a full week. I buy things like tomatoes and avocados and other fruit before it has ripened. With this budget, I cannot afford to have food going bad in the fridge.
To get the kind of variety in produce I crave I must go to a big market, like the rustic Cuatro Caminos about 4 kilometers (about 2 1/2 miles) from my home.
I have the luxury of having a car I can drive whenever I want to go to Cuatro Caminos. But most Cubans don’t have cars and must use undependable public transportation, and must go either before or after work, or on their days off.
Transportation costs vary depending on type of bus, but the newer ones known here as omnibuses generally cost 1 peso for a one-way trip. A ride in one of the 1950s era American cars used by Cubans for taxis would cost me about 10 pesos each way to and from the market.
Ms. Snow has been in Cuba for nine years, I wonder what’s prompted her sudden interest in the Cuban’s daily struggle to put food on the table. Could it be to white wash her years spent living the high life in Havana at their expense?
She blames food rationing in Cuba on the embargo, not even mentioning castro’s agrarian reform and
The failure of socialist large estate.
The 45-year-old food ration system that many Cubans consider their birthright seems destined for eventual elimination — or at least a major overhaul.
Created as a temporary measure to cover basic nutritional needs, Cuba’s “Control of Sales for Food Products” program was launched amid severe shortages prompted when the United States imposed a total trade embargo on the island in 1962. In the 1990s, it ensured people did not starve when food became dangerously scarce after the Soviet Union’s collapse crippled the island’s economy.
By the mid-1990s, the economy was improving and Cuba was importing food from other countries. It even began buying U.S. food in 2001 through a new loophole in the embargo. Cuba also began producing some of its own food, mostly vegetables grown through new urban agriculture projects.
What does she think Cubans did for food before the revolution, stand in line for hand outs from the mafia?
The link is here. Their commenting rules do not permit, ahem, profanity .
Anita Snow, unlike most Cubans, probably has a modern refrigerator. The Cuban people usually have old Russian refrigerators, that have a loud motor and in which beer goes flat from lack of cooling, or the antique Frigidaire hulks like that owned by Dr. Molina.
What Ms. Snow really need to do to live like a Cuban is TO the following:
Give up her air conditioned appartment and move to one that DOESN’T HAVE electricity.
Don’t worry so much about stocking up her refrigerator. Most Cuban that have one only keep water inside it since there is NO ELECTRICITY 75% of the time.
Take the bus and make the lines just like all ORDINARY Cubans.
Lt’s see how much time Ms. Snow has to write her biased columns when she has to spend all day LOOKING for her next MEAL.
Anita Snow is never going to eat [or NOT EAT] like a Cuban. For starters and the most important thing, Ms. Snow DOES NOT HAVE A RATION CARD! That’s the ACE in trying to eat like a Cuban, plus she has access to DOLLARS, most Cubans do not have that. Oh, she may have to drive in her air-conditioned car to the nearest farmer’s market, but she has dollars in her purse that she can just whip out. Plus, me thinks that if she is really very hungry, she’ll probably raid the refrigerator for supply of well-hidden Twinkies.
I suspect that Snow is doing this to have more legitimacy in knocking the embargo which of course she is blaming for Cuba’s shortages.
LITTLE DOES IT MATTER THAT CUBA IS A COUNTRY WITH FOUR HARVESTING SEASONS AND THAT CUBA BEFORE CASTRO WAS A SELF-SUFFICIENT FOOD PRODUCER THAT IN FACT USED TO EXPORT FOOD TO OTHER COUNTRIES.
This Snow job ought to know a thing or two about eating. She is, after all, a parasite disguised as a “journalist.”