A2 · Elementary
10 min
food cultureeconomicslatin americahistory
The Ration Book and the Empty Plate: Cuba, Food, and the Crisis
La Libreta y el Plato Vacío: Cuba, la Comida, y la Crisis
Sherritt International suspends its mining operations in Cuba over fear of expanding U.S. sanctions, and Cuba's economic crisis hits harder than ever at the dinner table. Fletcher and Octavio explore the history of Cuban rationing, what people actually eat today, and why the embargo is not the only explanation.
Sherritt International suspende sus operaciones mineras en Cuba por miedo a las sanciones estadounidenses, y la crisis económica cubana golpea cada vez más fuerte en la cocina. Fletcher y Octavio exploran la historia del racionamiento en Cuba, lo que come la gente hoy, y por qué el embargo no es la única explicación.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| la libreta | ration book | Cada familia tiene una libreta para comprar comida. |
| pasar hambre | to go hungry | En el Período Especial, muchas personas pasan hambre. |
| los frijoles | beans | En Cuba hay arroz y frijoles negros todos los días. |
| el embargo | embargo / trade blockade | El embargo de los Estados Unidos es un problema grande para Cuba. |
| el sofrito | sofrito (base sauce of garlic, onion, and tomato) | El sofrito tiene ajo, cebolla y tomate. |
| el paladar | private home restaurant (Cuba) | Los paladares son restaurantes privados en casas cubanas. |
I want to ask you about a place I've reported from exactly twice, and both times I left feeling like I understood less about it than when I arrived.
Cuba.
Specifically, what people there actually eat right now.
La situación es muy seria, Fletcher.
The situation is very serious, Fletcher.
La comida en Cuba es difícil ahora.
Food in Cuba is difficult right now.
And there's fresh context for this.
A Canadian mining company called Sherritt International just suspended all its operations in Cuba and pulled out its foreign staff, because the U.S.
looks like it's expanding sanctions.
Which is one more blow to an economy that was already struggling to feed people.
Muchas personas en Cuba no tienen suficiente comida.
Many people in Cuba don't have enough food.
Esto no es nuevo.
This is not new.
It's not new.
But it's getting worse.
Walk me through what the average Cuban household actually looks like at mealtimes right now.
En Cuba hay arroz y frijoles negros.
In Cuba there is rice and black beans.
Eso es todo, muchos días.
That is all, on many days.
Rice and black beans, every day.
Not as a side dish.
As the whole meal.
That's what a lot of families are working with.
La carne es muy cara.
Meat is very expensive.
El pollo también es difícil de encontrar.
Chicken is also hard to find.
Okay, and this connects to something I want to make sure our listeners understand, because it's one of the most unusual food systems in the world.
Cuba has a rationing book.
Tell me about that.
Sí.
Yes.
En Cuba cada familia tiene una libreta.
In Cuba every family has a ration book.
Es un papel del gobierno.
It is a paper from the government.
A government-issued ration book.
Every household gets one.
And it entitles you to a fixed amount of basic food every month at subsidized prices.
Con la libreta, compras comida barata.
With the ration book, you buy cheap food.
Sin la libreta, la comida es muy cara.
Without the ration book, food is very expensive.
And the system is old.
This isn't a recent emergency measure.
The libreta dates back to 1962.
Fidel Castro introduced it the year after the Bay of Pigs invasion, when the U.S.
embargo was biting hard and the government needed to guarantee some minimum nutrition for everyone.
La libreta tiene más de sesenta años.
The ration book is more than sixty years old.
Es parte de la vida cubana.
It is part of Cuban life.
Part of the fabric of daily life for three generations of Cubans.
And yet the amounts it covers have been shrinking for decades.
In the nineties it got catastrophically worse.
That period has a name.
Sí, el Período Especial.
Yes, the Special Period.
La Unión Soviética termina.
The Soviet Union ends.
Cuba pierde mucho dinero.
Cuba loses a lot of money.
El Período Especial en Tiempos de Paz.
The Special Period in Time of Peace.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba lost its main economic patron overnight.
Soviet subsidies, Soviet oil, Soviet food imports, all of it, gone.
What happened to the food supply?
Las personas pasan mucha hambre.
People go very hungry.
Hay muy poca comida en las tiendas.
There is very little food in the stores.
The average Cuban lost around twenty pounds in the early nineties.
Not through dieting.
Through genuine caloric deprivation.
The daily caloric intake dropped by something like a third.
Cubans were surviving on sugarcane juice and whatever they could grow in a pot on their balcony.
La gente cultiva comida en las ciudades.
People grow food in the cities.
En jardines pequeños, en balcones.
In small gardens, on balconies.
And that's not a metaphor.
That was a genuine national survival strategy.
Cuba became, almost by necessity, a global pioneer in urban agriculture.
They called them organoponicos, community gardens built in vacant lots and rooftops across Havana and other cities.
At the peak, Havana was producing something like eighty percent of its own vegetables locally.
Los organoponicos son famosos en todo el mundo.
The organoponicos are famous all over the world.
Muchos países quieren copiar esto.
Many countries want to copy this.
Genuinely.
Environmental scientists and urban planners studied Cuba's model for decades afterward.
There's a bitter irony in the fact that one of the world's most innovative approaches to sustainable city farming came out of desperate poverty.
But here we are.
Hoy la situación es diferente pero también muy difícil.
Today the situation is different but also very difficult.
El dinero no alcanza.
The money is not enough.
The money doesn't reach.
That phrase lands hard.
Cuba is in the middle of what analysts are calling its worst economic crisis since the Special Period.
Inflation has been running at triple digits.
The peso has collapsed.
And now another round of U.S.
sanctions is on the table.
Which is what pushed Sherritt out.
El embargo de los Estados Unidos es un problema grande.
The United States embargo is a big problem.
Pero el gobierno cubano también tiene problemas.
But the Cuban government also has problems.
That's a more honest framing than you hear from either side of this argument, frankly.
The U.S.
government says the embargo is about democracy and human rights.
The Cuban government blames the embargo for everything.
The reality is that both things are true simultaneously, and that doesn't make for clean political messaging.
El gobierno de Cuba no gestiona bien la agricultura.
The Cuban government does not manage agriculture well.
Eso es verdad también.
That is also true.
Right.
Cuba imports roughly sixty to seventy percent of its food.
A country with fertile soil, a warm climate, and a long agricultural history is importing most of what it eats.
That's not entirely the embargo's fault.
That's also decades of centralized agricultural policy that discouraged private farming and created chronic inefficiencies.
Antes, los agricultores privados no pueden vender libremente.
Before, private farmers cannot sell freely.
Las reglas son muy estrictas.
The rules are very strict.
There have been some reforms, small openings for private farmers and small restaurants, but the fundamental structure hasn't changed enough to solve the food problem.
And you mentioned private restaurants.
That's where I want to go next, because when I was in Havana, the food I ate was not in a state restaurant.
Los paladares son restaurantes privados en casas.
Paladares are private restaurants in homes.
La comida allí es mejor.
The food there is better.
Paladares.
The word itself is great.
It comes from a Brazilian soap opera that was huge in Cuba in the nineties, where a character builds a food empire from nothing and calls it Paladar.
The show aired right during the Special Period, and Cubans started calling their home restaurants the same thing.
Language absorbing life in real time.
Los paladares son populares entre los turistas.
Paladares are popular with tourists.
Dan trabajo a muchas familias.
They give work to many families.
But tourism is also down, badly, partly because of the energy crisis.
Rolling blackouts in Cuba have been lasting twelve to twenty hours a day in some areas.
If you can't keep the lights on, it's hard to run a restaurant, hard to keep food cold, hard to keep anything functioning.
Sin electricidad, la comida se estropea.
Without electricity, food spoils.
Para las familias, esto es un problema enorme.
For families, this is a huge problem.
And now you add Sherritt pulling out, potentially more sanctions coming, and the peso continuing to collapse.
The people who can afford to buy food on the informal market are spending an enormous percentage of their income just to eat.
People who only have pesos and a libreta are eating less and less each month.
La gente joven quiere salir de Cuba.
Young people want to leave Cuba.
Quieren una vida mejor.
They want a better life.
Cuba is losing people at a rate that hasn't been seen since the Mariel boatlift in 1980.
The estimates are staggering.
More than half a million Cubans left in 2022 and 2023 alone.
When a country's young people are leaving that fast, the agricultural labor force goes with them, the cooks go, the people who know how to keep a paladar running go.
Pero la cocina cubana es muy rica.
But Cuban cooking is very rich.
Los cubanos tienen mucho orgullo de su comida.
Cubans have great pride in their food.
Tell me about the food itself.
Because we've been talking about scarcity, but Cuban cuisine is genuinely extraordinary when there's enough to work with.
El sofrito es muy importante en Cuba.
The sofrito is very important in Cuba.
Es la base de muchos platos.
It is the base of many dishes.
Tiene ajo, cebolla y tomate.
It has garlic, onion, and tomato.
Sofrito as the foundation.
The Spanish influence is obvious there, but Cuban sofrito has its own character, shaped by African, Caribbean, and Chinese influences that came through a century of immigration and trade.
The ropa vieja, the lechón, the moros y cristianos, rice and black beans cooked together, whose name literally translates to 'Moors and Christians,' which is a whole history lesson in a side dish.
Oye, Fletcher.
Hey, Fletcher.
Antes yo digo 'pasar hambre'.
Before I said 'to go hungry'.
¿Entiendes eso?
Do you understand that?
Honestly, I caught it and it stopped me for a second.
Pasar hambre.
Pasar means 'to pass' or 'to spend time.' So literally you're saying 'to pass through hunger,' which is a strange construction if you're an English speaker.
We just say 'to go hungry' and leave it at that.
En español 'pasar' es para experiencias difíciles.
In Spanish, 'pasar' is for difficult experiences.
Pasas frío, pasas miedo, pasas hambre.
You pass cold, you pass fear, you pass hunger.
So it's almost like the difficulty moves through you, or you move through it.
'Pasar frío,' to be cold.
'Pasar miedo,' to be scared.
'Pasar hambre,' to go hungry.
The verb does a lot of work in Spanish that we spread across a bunch of different words in English.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y en Cuba ahora, muchas personas pasan hambre.
And in Cuba now, many people go hungry.
Es una frase muy seria.
It is a very serious phrase.
It is.
And that's where I want to leave this, because sometimes the most important thing a language does is give you the exact words for a reality that other languages blur past.
Pasar hambre.
Not just hunger as an abstraction.
Hunger as something you move through, something that has a shape and a duration.
For a lot of Cubans right now, it has both.