Tex-Mex joint, a Cuban will boldly state that Mexican food doesn’t measure up to our great cuisine.
Some of us promote ourselves with well thought-out strategies. Take the home of the classic mojito cocktail, Havana’s Bodeguita del Medio, an internationally famous watering hole that has spawned knock-offs throughout the world. (In the movie version of Miami Vice, Collin Farrell and Gong Li visit a big salsa-dancing club that is ostensibly the original Bodeguita, whereas the real place is the size of a bathroom.) Everywhere you find a clone of the Old Havana hole-in-the-wall, you will find this quote by Papa Hemingway: “My daiquiri at the Floridita, my mojito at La Bodeguita.” Which is a bold-faced lie. While Hemingway did favor the upscale Floridita, home of the frozen daiquiri, at most he may have staggered, drunk and ornery, into the funky La Bodeguita once. Ah, but that did not stop a Cuban publicist and Bodeguita regular from coining the phrase for his friend the bar owner. Yes, we’re good publicizing ourselves. And our food.
But what is Cuban food?
Go to any number of Miami Cuban restaurants and you will find identical menus. Nothing out of the ordinary here. The same is true for Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Thai, and countless other national cuisines. Popular joints all serve up the same limited list of dishes. It’s not that the national menu is so narrow; it’s that only a fraction of a country’s dishes cross over to el Norte. Sometimes the menu is delineated by a large immigration from a particular region. Thus, many Colombian restaurants in the US serve up the cuisine of Medellín or the surrounding Antioquia province, while one is hard-pressed to find the interesting dishes of the country’s Caribbean coast. In Cuban Miami, the menu is fixed more by time than by geography: It’s what came over with the first wave of Cuban exiles in the early 1960s, the group that calls itself el exilio histórico. I have yet to find, for example, a Miami restaurant that serves pescado en salsa de perro, a fish recipe from the coast near my father’s hometown.
Because of the toll the Revolution took on the island’s food (more about this later), the Miami Cuban menu did not vary much with subsequent waves of immigration such as the marielitos (the Mariel boat lift of 1980) and the balseros (the rafters who still make the journey today). Instead, the menu began assimilating influences from other countries.
The most notable is the cortadito, espresso served in a demitasse cup with a dollop of milk foam. To begin with, very few places are strict about the foam, and a cortadito in Miami has become a junior café con leche, i.e. a short latte. That lackadaisical attitude is probably due to the fact that though the cortadito today is a staple of Cuban Miami, it’s not Cuban at all. We Cubans have always had our coffee dark roasted and heavily sweetened—after all, we’re sugar producers. Before Italian espresso machines, Cuban coffee was dripped through a cloth and served either black with sugar or with boiled milk, also with sugar. Italian machines gave us a taste for espresso—Cuban coffee is nothing but sweetened espresso. All over the Havana of my childhood, there were espresso stands where you could have a tiny cup for five cents in the good neighborhoods and three cents in less tony ones. I don’t recall ever seeing a woman standing at an espresso stand. For one stood. No stools, no chairs, never mind Starbucks sofas. Men adopted a certain stance, as writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante observed: leaning forward so as not to let any drops of coffee drip on his white linen suit, and with the free hand on the solar plexus to keep his tie out of harm’s way or restrain his billowing white linen guayabera. To this day, even in jeans and T-shirt, I drink my coffee that way.
In the old Cuban days we drank espresso in a demitasse and café con leche in a regular cup (some preferred it in a glass on a saucer). But never a cortadito. Cortado is the Spanish word for what Italians call macchiato, espresso cut (cortado) with steamed milk foam. I first encountered it in Spain, during my first trip there in 1969. And so did other Cubans—Spain, the mother country, being one of our favorite destinations. Plus a number of exiles fled first to Madrid instead of Miami, where they eventually resettled. (Miami is where old Cuban elephants come to die, as the saying goes.) The cortado—or cortadito, given our affinity for the diminutive that makes a café a cafecito—was imported to Miami, and caught on to the point of becoming synonymous with our culture. A snob and a curmudgeon, I only drink cortadito at the most important Cuban coffee stand in town, the window at the huge and famous Versailles coffee shop on Calle Ocho, where they make it properly, with foam. And I even love their wicked twist, making it with evaporated rather than fresh milk, a true oddity that is absolutely delicious.
The other item that’s popular at the Versailles coffee shop window, besides passionate discussions of anti-Castro Cuban politics, is croquetas. The croquette is a Miami Cuban staple. I have never figured out how it became so, other than that it was a popular Cuban fast-food snack back home. We Cubans love them. God knows I used to devour them as a kid, and my US-born children, once introduced to them, got hooked as well. A traditional French croquette—or Spanish croqueta, which can be had at most Miami Spanish restaurants—is made from a thick béchamel flavored with minced ham, chicken or fish (codfish croquetas are a Spanish restaurant staple), sometimes cheese. The mixture should be thick enough to hold its cylinder shape while it is rolled in egg and breadcrumbs and deep fried.
My older sons only visited Miami once or twice a year and always had the jones for Cuban croquetas, so when they began cooking for themselves, they asked me for the recipe. I obliged by sending them two versions. One was from the high road: Julia Child’s recipe from The Art of French Cooking. The second source was more authentic: Nitza Villapol’s classic Cuban cookbook, Cocina al minuto. They tried both. They didn’t like them.
“Dad,” they told me over the phone, “these don’t taste like what we eat in Miami.” “That’s because they’re too refined,” I replied. “Even the Cuban recipe won’t taste the same because you’re frying it in fresh oil, not something that’s been used for a week, and the croquetas haven’t been sitting under a heat lamp all day.” I exaggerated, of course—the fast turnover at Versailles assures fresh-fried croquetas, which sometimes require a wait, and it’s one reason I like them. But if you make them at home, a certain element of funk will be missing. As for authentic Old World croquetas, I ordered some at a good Spanish restaurant in Miami when one of my sons was still a pre-teen, and he didn’t like them either. The béchamel sauce was just too authentic. You could taste the nutmeg. He wanted the vulgar version from a Cuban street joint, which he consumes in large quantities to this day.
I can understand. In my own pre-teens my parents enrolled me in a class at a Havana swim club that had a coffee shop. Every day after class I’d have a ham croqueta. Today, the combination of tropical climate and a swim elicits a Pavlovian hunger for a greasy croqueta. So I’m like everyone else, susceptible to comfort food and drink. And since I was born and raised in Cuba, Cuba BC (Before Castro), when foodstuffs were varied and plentiful, I can hang at the coffee window of Versailles, sip thick, sweet coffee and wolf down croquetas fresh from the fryer with the best of them.
But I’m avoiding the question—and will probably do so throughout this essay. What is Cuban food? Or more precisely, what is Cuban about Cuban food?
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There is a flavor thread that runs through Latin American food, and if one were to name it, the word would be criollo. It’s the Spanish for Creole, and it describes what happens to culinary traditions, particularly the vernacular ones passed from generation to generation of home cooks, when they grow roots in the Americas. Some call it fusion because on American soil different traditions meld to create new flavors. But fusion is an overworked word that has to do with innovative cuisine, and there’s nothing innovative about criollo cooking, unless it’s the innovation created by the accidents of history.
In the States we use the word Creole to refer to the people and, most famously, the cuisine of New Orleans. Indeed, when one thinks of that city and its region, various cultures come to mind: Native American, French, African, Spanish—in very broad terms, since each of those categories encompasses multiple cultures. And one could deconstruct a New Orleans or Louisiana dish, like a gumbo or a jambalaya, to locate the sources of the ingredients and techniques. But this highly celebrated cuisine—rightfully so, I would say—is more than the sum of its influences. In other words, nothing tastes like it. In part this is because as cultures come together, their offspring ripen into something distinct. And in part