Cuba: Cubanos and Courage

Cuba is a small island with a colossal history, where empire, sugar, and revolution collided again and again, forging a nation in the heat of rebellion. From Havana’s coral-stone fortresses to the cane fields of Matanzas, Cuba’s story has always been driven by workers: enslaved Africans who cut the cane that powered Spain’s wealth, cigar rollers whose factory floors doubled as political classrooms, dockworkers who organized in the shadows, and students who sprinted through the streets shouting for liberty. Every generation of Cubans has inherited a struggle, against colonial rule, against racial hierarchy, against dictators backed by foreign capital, against gangsters using the island as a playground, and every fight has left fingerprints not only on the nation’s politics, but on its cuisine.

What the world often romanticizes as “classic Cuban food” is actually a history of these struggles, built from the ingredients of survival: starchy roots, inexpensive cuts of meat, rice stretched to fill hungry stomachs in hard times. The kitchens of the enslaved, the boarding houses of cigar workers, the strike lines of Havana, the clandestine hideouts of rebels in the Sierra Maestra, all of them shaped the dishes we now consider essential to Cuban identity.

Our journey begins in the 19th century, when Cuba was the last major slave society in the Americas. Yuca con Mojo, a simple dish of boiled cassava drenched in garlic-citrus marinade, fed enslaved workers through the long decades leading up to the Cuban Wars of Independence (1868–1886).

By the early 20th century, abolition had ended but racial hierarchy had not. In 1912, Afro-Cuban veterans and workers of the Independent Party of Color rose up in the face of broken promises, segregation, and political exclusion. Their rebellion, and the brutal state repression that followed, is echoed in Picadillo, a humble ground-beef stew stretched with olives, raisins, and broth by families who lived through scarcity and sabotage. It was workman's food in an era when workers’ rights were still a dangerous dream.

Just a few years later, the streets filled again. During the 1917–1918 Havana Streetcar Workers’ Strike, one of the first major urban labor movements in the republic, the people who operated the capital’s modern lifeline fought for wages and dignity. In countless homes, Flan, eggs, sugar, condensed milk, the sweetness of the working class, became a comfort shared in solidarity meetings and blackout nights.

Then came the storm of the Revolution of 1933, when students, laborers, and sergeants rose against Gerardo Machado’s dictatorship. It was a year of mutinies, occupations, and alliances brokered in cafeterías and tenement kitchens. Ropa Vieja, with its long-simmered, shredded beef, mirrored the era’s shredded social order, threads pulled apart and re-woven into something new. It was the flavor of a Cuba trying to rebuild itself from scraps.

But the victories of the 1930s faded. By the 1950s, Fulgencio Batista ruled through corruption and coercion, offering a façade of modernity while workers suffered under what many called a “false prosperity.” At family gatherings and suburban street parties, Lechón Asado, the ages-old tradition of slow-roasted pork, symbolized both celebration and contradiction: a feast in a time of inequality, a reminder of the rural roots of a people betrayed by political elites.

As discontent simmered, so did the pans of street vendors. Tostones with garlic sauce, cheap, fast, and sustaining, fed supporters during the 1957 General Strike, one of the most pivotal national mobilizations against Batista, a moment when the working class flexed its collective power, even as the strike was crushed.

Then came 1959. Victory. Upheaval. A new era. In the jubilant months after Batista fled, the Cubano and Medianoche sandwiches, pressed, portable, packed with pork, ham, and Swiss, became the food of a nation on the move. They fed jubilant crowds, militia members, and ordinary people who believed the revolution would deliver everything previous regimes had denied.

Yet the Revolution was not merely won with guns; it was also built with pencils and textbooks. During the 1961 Literacy Campaign, as teenagers and workers fanned into the countryside to teach reading and writing, Croquetas Cubanas became pocket-sized fuel, practical, savory, and beloved. They symbolized the empowerment of everyday people, the belief that education could transform a nation.

And then came the 1990s: the Special Period, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Blackouts, hunger, bicycle brigades, improvisation as a way of life. In those years, Arroz Congrí (Moros y Cristianos), rice and beans cooked together into one filling pot, became the emblem of national survival. It was the dish that held Cuba together when the island was forced to rely on its own ingenuity, community networks, and stubborn hope.

This is Cuba told through its food: not the tourist Cuba, not the mythic Cuba, but the Cuba of strikes and songs, machetes and molasses, students and stevedores, literacy brigades and blackout kitchens. A Cuba where each dish carries the echo of an uprising, a union hall, a rebel campfire, or a crowded Havana street.

So sharpen your knife and warm your skillet. This is Cuba served hot.

Yuca Con Mojo: Roots of Freedom

Cassava, or yuca, itself predates Spain. Indigenous Taíno communities cultivated yuca as a staple long before Columbus arrived in 1492. Hardy, drought-resistant, and filling, it survived hurricanes and poor soils where European grains failed. When Spanish colonization wiped out much of the Indigenous population through disease, violence, and enslavement, yuca remained. It passed from Taíno hands into African ones, becoming a cornerstone of survival for enslaved people brought to the island in ever-growing numbers. By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Cuba had transformed into one of the world’s most lucrative sugar producers, a transformation powered almost entirely by enslaved African labor. Sugar wealth hardened the colony’s social order: a small white planter elite, a Spanish colonial state, and a massive population of enslaved and free people of color who did the work and bore the cost.

Yuca con mojo emerged within this brutal economy as subsistence food. Enslaved people were often provisioned with root vegetables and allowed small garden plots, where cassava thrived. Garlic, citrus, and oil, when available, were pooled communally, crushed together, shared. Mojo was not just flavor; it was resistance to monotony and deprivation, a way to assert humanity in conditions designed to strip it away.

Cuba’s colonial status sharpened this tension. While much of Spanish America broke away in the early 19th century, Cuba remained firmly under Spanish rule. The planter class feared independence because it threatened slavery, and Spain depended on Cuban sugar revenue. By the mid-1800s, however, the system was cracking. Enslaved revolts, maroon communities in the countryside, and abolitionist ideas flowing from Haiti, Europe, and the Americas destabilized the colony. Free people of color, often barred from political power despite education or service, found common cause with enslaved rebels. The struggle for abolition and the struggle for independence became inseparable.

That fusion exploded in 1868 with the Ten Years’ War, launched by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes when he freed his enslaved workers and declared Cuban independence. The war was chaotic, under-resourced, and brutally repressed, but it marked a turning point. Afro-Cuban fighters joined in large numbers, not as auxiliaries but as leaders and soldiers who understood that independence without abolition was meaningless. Rebel camps were improvised and mobile, surviving off what could be grown, hunted, or carried. Yuca was ideal: portable, filling, and familiar. Boiled over campfires, dressed with whatever citrus or oil could be scavenged, yuca con mojo became fuel for a war that promised freedom but delivered mostly hardship.

Spain responded with scorched-earth tactics, mass executions, and the deliberate targeting of Black insurgents. Yet the idea of liberation could not be uprooted. Even when the Ten Years’ War ended in 1878 without independence, it forced concessions. Gradual abolition laws followed, freeing children born to enslaved women and promising eventual emancipation. These half-measures satisfied no one. For enslaved people, freedom delayed was freedom denied. For Afro-Cuban veterans who had fought and bled, the betrayal cut deep. Like yuca still hard at the center, the colony remained unyielding.

The struggle resumed in fits and starts, the Little War of 1879–1880, continued resistance in the countryside, and mounting international pressure. Slavery became increasingly untenable, morally and economically. Finally, in 1886, Spain formally abolished slavery in Cuba, making it the last major colony in the Americas to do so. The law did not deliver equality. Formerly enslaved people were freed into poverty, discrimination, and political exclusion. Many returned to agricultural labor under new names but familiar conditions. Still, abolition mattered. It cracked the foundation of colonial rule and made full independence inevitable.

Throughout these years, yuca con mojo remained a food of the poor, the Black, and the dispossessed. It crossed lines quietly. In rural kitchens and urban tenements, in veterans’ homes and workers’ gatherings, it found its way into pots. When José Martí later articulated a vision of a racially inclusive Cuban nation, he drew from this lived reality: a people forged not in salons but in fields, kitchens, and camps.

By the time the final War of Independence erupted in 1895, Afro-Cubans were again at the forefront, fighting not only Spain but the lingering hierarchies left by slavery. Leaders like Antonio Maceo embodied this continuity, Black, uncompromising, and deeply tied to the earlier abolitionist struggle. The food of the insurgents changed little. Yuca remained. Mojo remained. What changed was the meaning layered onto them. They were no longer just survival food; they were reminders of what had already been endured and what still had to be won.

Slavery’s abolition in 1886 did not end exploitation, and independence did not arrive until years later, under the shadow of U.S. intervention. But the dish endures because it carries the truth of Cuban history: that liberation is rarely clean, rarely complete, and never handed down from above.

Mojo is simply delicious, and very much a delicious addition to yuca!

Yuca con Mojo (Cassava with Garlic-Citrus Sauce)

Ingredients

2 lbs yuca (cassava), peeled and cut into chunks
6 cloves garlic, minced
½ cup olive oil
½ cup sour orange juice (or substitute equal parts orange juice and lime juice)
1 onion, thinly sliced
Salt, to taste

Instructions

Boil the yuca in salted water until fork-tender, about 20–25 minutes. Drain and keep warm.
In a skillet over medium heat, warm the olive oil. Add the sliced onion and minced garlic; sauté until softened and fragrant but not browned.
Remove from heat and stir in the sour orange juice and a generous pinch of salt.
Pour the hot mojo sauce over the yuca and gently toss to coat.
Serve warm as a side dish.

Picadillo: Bitter Integration

Picadillo’s origins lie in Spain, a descendant of Spanish and Portuguese minced-meat stews meant to stretch scarce protein across many mouths. In Cuba, it changed. Beef became more available after independence-era cattle expansion; tomatoes and peppers reflected Caribbean agriculture; olives and raisins arrived through colonial trade routes. What emerged was not Spanish anymore but creole: a dish shaped by mixture, improvisation, and necessity. It was common in urban kitchens and rural homes alike, particularly among working-class families. Picadillo was not celebratory food. It was weekday food, the kind made after long hours of labor, served with rice to make it last. Its logic was integration, take what you have, cut it small, and make it one.

That idea of integration sat at the heart of Cuba’s post-abolition struggle. When slavery was formally abolished in 1886, the legal institution ended, but its social structure did not. Afro-Cubans entered freedom without land, compensation, or political power. Many remained tied to plantations through debt, seasonal labor, or outright coercion. Racial discrimination persisted openly in hiring, housing, and education. Yet Afro-Cubans were not outsiders to the nation taking shape. They had fought for it. From the Ten Years’ War through the final War of Independence, Black soldiers and officers had made up a massive portion of the rebel armies. Leaders like Antonio Maceo were not symbols, they were architects of independence. The promise of the republic, articulated most clearly by José Martí, was that Cuba would be a nation “with all and for the good of all,” beyond race.

Independence, when it finally arrived in 1898–1902, came compromised. Spain was defeated, but the United States occupied the island, reshaping the new state to protect U.S. economic and strategic interests. The Platt Amendment restricted Cuban sovereignty, allowing U.S. intervention and anchoring American power in Cuban politics. Sugar estates consolidated further. Foreign capital flowed in. The early republic presented itself as modern and raceless, insisting that racial categories belonged to the colonial past. In practice, this rhetoric of “color-blindness” became a tool of exclusion. If race no longer officially existed, then racism could not be acknowledged, let alone challenged.

Afro-Cubans felt this contradiction acutely. They were citizens on paper, veterans in memory, and second-class in reality. Black veterans were denied pensions. Skilled Black workers were excluded from unions. Segregation persisted in clubs, schools, and public spaces. Political parties courted Black voters but offered little in return. The republic asked Afro-Cubans to dissolve into the national mixture without changing the balance of power, much like picadillo’s ingredients, chopped small enough to disappear, but never allowed to reshape the dish itself.

Out of this tension emerged the Independent Party of Color (Partido Independiente de Color, PIC), founded in 1908 by Evaristo Estenoz and Pedro Ivonet, both Afro-Cuban veterans of the independence wars. The party did not call for separation or supremacy. Its platform was modest and radical at the same time: an end to racial discrimination, fair employment, education access, and recognition of Black veterans’ sacrifices. In a political system dominated by white elites, even this was intolerable. The existence of a Black-led party exposed the lie of racial equality. The government responded not by addressing grievances, but by criminalizing the organization itself. In 1910, the Morúa Law was passed, banning political parties based on race. Officially, it defended national unity. In reality, it silenced Afro-Cuban political expression.

By 1912, pressure had reached a breaking point. When the government refused to repeal the law or address PIC demands, protests and armed demonstrations erupted, primarily in eastern Cuba. The uprising was fragmented, poorly armed, and never posed a serious threat to the state. What followed was not a restoration of order but a campaign of terror. The Cuban army, backed tacitly by U.S. forces positioned offshore, unleashed widespread violence against Afro-Cuban communities. Soldiers and militias killed indiscriminately; fighters, noncombatants, men, women. Bodies were left unburied. Estimates range from 3,000 to 6,000 Afro-Cubans murdered in a matter of weeks. Estenoz and Ivonet were killed. The rebellion was crushed not just militarily, but symbolically. The message was unmistakable: Black political autonomy would not be tolerated in the republic they had helped win.

The aftermath was silence enforced by fear. Official narratives reframed the massacre as a defense of national unity against “race war.” Afro-Cubans were warned that organizing as Afro-Cubans invited annihilation. Survival required invisibility. The republic doubled down on its myth: Cuba was raceless, harmonious, already integrated.

In kitchens across the island, picadillo continued to be cooked. It fed families who had lost sons in the uprising, laborers who returned to fields and factories under tighter surveillance, veterans who learned that their wartime sacrifices had earned them neither security nor voice. The dish absorbed new meanings. Beef, once scarce, now came from an economy that demanded Black labor while denying Black power.

Picadillo is delicious. If you’ve ever had Pastelitos, this is often the filling. Its great as a dish on its own as well.

Picadillo (Cuban Ground Beef Stew)

Ingredients

1 lb ground beef
1 onion, diced
1 green bell pepper, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
½ cup tomato sauce
¼ cup beef broth (or water)
¼ cup raisins
¼ cup green olives, sliced
2 tbsp capers (optional)
2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp dried oregano
Olive oil, for cooking
Salt and black pepper, to taste

Instructions

Heat a splash of olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add onion, bell pepper, and garlic; sauté until softened.
Add ground beef, breaking it up with a spoon. Season with salt, pepper, cumin, and oregano. Cook until browned.
Stir in tomato sauce, broth, raisins, olives, and capers (if using).
Reduce heat and simmer uncovered for 15–20 minutes until thickened and flavorful.
Serve hot with white rice or use as a filling for empanadas/pastelitos.

Flan Cubano: Sweetness on Strike

Flan’s roots, like so much of Cuban cuisine, are Iberian. Custards made from eggs, milk, and sugar were common in Spain by the early modern period, often tied to convent kitchens and courtly traditions. In Cuba, the dish transformed. Sugar was no longer a luxury but the backbone of the economy, produced at massive human cost. Fresh milk was unevenly available, but condensed milk, introduced through global trade and increasingly common in urban markets, made flan possible even for poorer households. Eggs came from backyard chickens or small vendors. What emerged was flan cubano: simpler, firmer, often baked in modest molds, sometimes stretched with canned milk, always finished with burnt sugar caramel. It was not festive food alone. It was a dessert for Sundays, for birthdays, for moments when families wanted to mark time as more than survival.

The years after 1912 were marked by that desire to move forward without reopening wounds the state had violently sealed. The massacre of the Independent Party of Color had crushed Afro-Cuban political organizing and left a warning etched into public life. Race, officially, no longer existed. Class, however, became increasingly visible. As Cuba urbanized, Havana grew rapidly, swelling with rural migrants, former plantation workers, artisans, dockworkers, domestic servants, and clerks. The sugar economy still dominated the island, but the city became its nervous system, handling transport, finance, imports, and administration. Electrified streetcars ran through Havana’s arteries, carrying workers from overcrowded neighborhoods to workshops, docks, offices, and markets. These streetcars were symbols of modernity, but they were powered by labor that was underpaid, overworked, and easily discarded.

The Cuban Republic in the 1910s was formally independent but structurally dependent. U.S. capital dominated sugar, utilities, and transportation. The Platt Amendment loomed in the background, reminding Cubans that sovereignty had limits. Political power rotated among elite factions, often backed by patronage and fraud. Yet beneath this brittle political order, something new was forming: an urban working class increasingly aware of itself as a collective force. Mutual aid societies, labor clubs, anarchist and socialist newspapers, and informal networks spread through Havana. Unlike the PIC, these movements framed their demands in class terms rather than race, partly out of survival, partly because exploitation cut across color lines, even if it did so unevenly.

Streetcar workers occupied a strategic position in this landscape. They were visible, essential, and concentrated. Long hours, dangerous conditions, arbitrary discipline, and wages eroded by inflation made their situation untenable. World War I intensified these pressures. Although Cuba entered the war late and largely symbolically, the global conflict drove up prices of food and basic goods. Wages did not keep pace. Sugar profits soared; working-class households felt only the strain. Eggs, milk, and sugar, flan’s building blocks, became harder to afford regularly. To make flan in these years was already an act of planning and restraint.

The first streetcar strikes in 1917 disrupted Havana’s daily rhythm. Cars stopped running. Workers walked miles to jobs or stayed home altogether. The city slowed, then snarled. Strikers demanded higher wages, shorter hours, and recognition of their union. Employers refused, confident in state support. The government, wary of unrest but dependent on urban order, oscillated between negotiation and repression. Police were deployed. Strike leaders were arrested. Newspapers alternated between sympathy and fear-mongering about chaos.

The strike of 1918 escalated matters. It lasted longer, spread wider, and drew in broader segments of the working class. Havana’s streets became sites of tension and solidarity. Cafeterías struggled without regular customers. Markets emptied more quickly. Yet these same spaces became hubs of conversation, rumor, and mutual aid. Food took on heightened meaning. A shared pot of beans, a pot of rice stretched one day further, a rare dessert made to lift spirits, all became social acts. Flan, when it appeared, was no longer just a treat. It was proof that life contained more than struggle, even in the midst of it.

Families adapted. Condensed milk replaced fresh. Smaller molds yielded thinner slices. Caramel was burned carefully, never wasted. Children learned patience, watching the custard cool, waiting for it to set. In workers’ homes, flan often followed days of walking instead of riding, of unpaid hours, of uncertainty. Its sweetness was not escapism; it was affirmation. The strike might end badly or well, but tonight there was something soft, sweet, and shared on the table.

The state ultimately broke the strike through a mix of concessions and force. Some wage increases were granted, but union recognition remained tenuous. Police surveillance intensified. Employers blacklisted militants. Yet the strike left marks that could not be erased. It demonstrated the power of coordinated urban labor. It normalized the idea that workers could shut down a city, not through rebellion in the countryside, but through collective withdrawal of labor at the center. The memory of the streetcars standing still lingered, a rehearsal for future struggles.

In the immediate aftermath, Havana returned to motion, but nothing was quite the same. Workers had tasted solidarity. Employers had glimpsed vulnerability. The state refined its methods of control. Cultural life absorbed the tension. Music, humor, and food carried meanings politics could not safely articulate. Flan remained on menus and in homes, associated with modest celebrations, with Sundays after mass, with moments when families gathered despite uncertainty. It did not symbolize triumph. It symbolized continuity.

There’s not much to say about flan other than the fact that it is one of the world’s most delicious desserts!

Flan Cubano (Cuban Caramel Custard)

Ingredients

Caramel:

¾ cup white sugar
2 tbsp water

Custard:

1 (14 oz) can sweetened condensed milk
1 (12 oz) can evaporated milk
4 large eggs
1 tbsp vanilla extract
Pinch of salt
Optional: 1 tsp rum or orange zest

Instructions

Caramel: In a heavy saucepan, combine sugar and water over medium heat. Swirl (don’t stir) until it turns deep golden amber (8–10 minutes). Quickly pour into a 9-inch round baking dish, tilting to coat the bottom. Set aside to harden.
Custard: Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C). Whisk eggs lightly in a bowl. Add condensed milk, evaporated milk, vanilla, salt, and optional rum/zest. Whisk until smooth, then strain through a sieve. Pour into the caramel-lined dish.
Place dish in a larger roasting pan. Add hot water to the outer pan until it reaches halfway up the sides (water bath).
Bake 55–65 minutes until center is just set but still slightly jiggly. Cool to room temperature, then refrigerate at least 3 hours.
To serve, run a knife around the edges and invert onto a rimmed plate. Let caramel sauce cascade over the top.

Ropa Vieja: Old Clothes, Torn Republic

Ropa vieja’s name, meaning “old clothes”, comes from its appearance: beef shredded into long, uneven strands, stewed patiently in tomatoes, onions, and peppers until what was once tough becomes tender, even comforting. Its history stretches back over five centuries to the Sephardic Jewish kitchens of medieval Spain. Because Jewish law prohibited cooking on the Sabbath, families prepared slow-cooked stews like adafina the night before; the leftover beef was then shredded and sautéed the following day to create a second meal. This practice followed Spanish colonists to the Canary Islands and eventually to the Caribbean, where it found its spiritual home. During the turbulent time following the Great Depression, it found its place in history.

The Havana streetcar workers’ strike of 1917–1918 did not overthrow the Cuban Republic, but it revealed its seams. In the years that followed, those seams widened. The immediate post-strike period was marked by motion without resolution. Streetcars ran again, sugar exports resumed their rhythms, and political elites congratulated themselves on restored order. Yet beneath the surface, the contradictions exposed by the strike deepened. Wages lagged behind prices. U.S. ownership of utilities, sugar mills, and infrastructure hardened dependency. Police surveillance of unions intensified. The state learned how to manage unrest without addressing its causes.

By the early 1920s, Cuba entered a period of volatility that made patience increasingly untenable. The postwar sugar boom collapsed into the infamous Dance of the Millions crash of 1920–1921. Sugar prices plummeted almost overnight, wiping out fortunes, bankrupting mills, and throwing thousands out of work. Rural misery flowed into the cities. Havana swelled with unemployed laborers, students unable to find positions, clerks whose salaries evaporated under inflation. Kitchens adapted again. Beef, once common in better times, became tougher, cheaper cuts when available at all. Ropa vieja, and its ability to transform cheap cuts of meat, fit the moment.

Politically, this instability set the stage for the rise of Gerardo Machado. Elected president in 1924 on a platform of modernization, nationalism, and reform, Machado initially appeared as a corrective to oligarchic stagnation. He promised public works, infrastructure, and dignity for Cuban sovereignty. Roads were built. Havana gleamed in parts. Machado governed increasingly through repression, patronage, and constitutional manipulation. By 1928, he had amended the constitution to extend his term. What began as reform hardened into dictatorship.

The Machado years coincided with the maturation of forces the state could no longer easily contain. The labor movement, battered but not destroyed after 1918, reorganized with greater ideological clarity. Socialist and communist organizers gained traction, especially among dockworkers, sugar workers, and urban laborers. Students emerged as a decisive political force. The University of Havana became a crucible of dissent, producing figures who linked anti-imperialism, labor solidarity, and democratic reform into a shared language of resistance. Unlike earlier uprisings tied to race or region, this opposition was broad, urban, and increasingly coordinated.

Ropa vieja, meanwhile, became deeply domestic. It simmered in crowded apartments and modest homes where multiple generations shared space and uncertainty. It was cooked slowly because it had to be. Tough meat demanded time, just as political change seemed to demand endurance beyond reason. Families pulled fibers apart with forks, stretching each portion.

The onset of the Great Depression after 1929 shattered what legitimacy Machado still possessed. Sugar prices collapsed again. Unemployment soared. State violence intensified. Torture, censorship, and exile became routine. Strikes multiplied despite repression. Dockworkers, transport workers, sugar laborers, and civil servants all challenged the regime. The government responded with brute force, but each act of repression shredded another strand of authority.

By the early 1930s, opposition to Machado converged into something qualitatively different from earlier unrest. Students organized mass protests and underground networks. Workers launched general strikes. Middle-class professionals withdrew support. Even parts of the military grew restless. The state’s fabric began to tear visibly. Streets once animated by streetcars and commerce became sites of barricades, demonstrations, and gunfire. Havana felt unstitched.

The Revolution of 1933 did not arrive as a single event but as a cascade of unraveling. In August, a general strike paralyzed the country. Transportation halted, not unlike 1917, but now on a national scale. Shops closed. Government offices emptied. The strike was not simply economic; it was openly political. Machado fled into exile, leaving behind a vacuum rather than a transition. The dictator was gone, but nothing had been agreed upon about what should replace him.

Provisional governments rose and fell. The so-called “Government of the One Hundred Days” attempted sweeping reforms, labor rights, university autonomy, nationalist economic measures, but lacked stability and international recognition. Workers pushed further. Students demanded more. The United States loomed, wary of radicalism and determined to shape outcomes.

Within weeks, another rupture occurred: the Sergeants’ Revolt, led by Fulgencio Batista, upended the military hierarchy and repositioned power behind the scenes. Batista did not immediately rule as dictator, but he became the indispensable figure, broker, enforcer, kingmaker. The revolution had torn the old clothes of Machado’s regime to shreds, but new garments were stitched hastily, unevenly, and with foreign thread.

In homes across Havana, ropa vieja continued to simmer. Beef was still scarce. Tomatoes and peppers stretched what little there was. Families ate amid uncertainty about tomorrow’s government, tomorrow’s job, tomorrow’s safety.

The immediate aftermath of 1933 left Cuba suspended between revolution and restoration. Many demands of workers and students were diluted or deferred. Repression returned in new forms. Batista’s rise signaled continuity beneath change. Yet something irreversible had occurred. The idea that a dictator could rule indefinitely had been torn apart. The notion that workers and students were peripheral to national politics had been shredded. The republic could no longer pretend its clothes were intact.

Ropa Vieja is peppery, filling, and delicious.

Ropa Vieja (Cuban Shredded Beef Stew)

Ingredients

2 lbs flank steak (or brisket/skirt steak)
1 onion, sliced
1 green bell pepper, sliced
1 red bell pepper, sliced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 (14 oz) can crushed tomatoes
½ cup tomato sauce
½ cup beef broth
½ cup dry white wine (optional)
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp dried oregano
2 bay leaves
¼ cup green olives (optional)
Olive oil, salt, and black pepper

Instructions

In a large pot, cover steak with salted water and simmer until very tender (1½–2 hours). Remove, cool slightly, and shred with two forks. Reserve some cooking liquid if needed.
In a large skillet, heat olive oil and sauté onion, peppers, and garlic until soft.
Add shredded beef, crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce, broth, wine, cumin, paprika, oregano, and bay leaves. Season with salt and pepper.
Simmer uncovered 30–40 minutes until sauce thickens. Stir in olives near the end.
Serve with white rice and tostones or black beans.

Lechón Asado: Crackling Skin, Hollow Promises

Lechón asado, roast pig marinated in Cuban Mojo sauce, has its roots in the rural Cuban countryside, shaped by Spanish roasting traditions and African communal cooking practices. Whole-animal roasting made sense where refrigeration was scarce and communities cooked together. A pig could feed dozens; the labor was shared; the feast was collective. In this sense, lechón was never elite cuisine. It was peasant food elevated by time, fire, and ritual. But by the 1940s and 1950s, it had taken on a second life, no longer just a countryside feast, but a national symbol deployed in advertisements, tourist brochures, and political rallies. The crackling skin gleamed like Cuba itself was supposed to gleam.

After the upheaval of 1933, Cuba entered a prolonged interregnum masked as normalization. Machado was gone, but the structures he relied on, U.S. economic dominance, a pliant political class, and a militarized response to labor, remained largely intact. Fulgencio Batista emerged from the wreckage not as a revolutionary hero but as an arbiter. Through the late 1930s, he ruled indirectly, shaping governments from behind the scenes while cultivating ties with Washington, business elites, and the military. By 1940, Batista stepped into legitimacy, winning the presidency under a new constitution that promised labor protections, social welfare, and national sovereignty. For many workers, it seemed the revolution’s energy had finally been institutionalized.

Batista’s first presidency (1940–1944) was, by comparison with what followed, restrained. He legalized unions, cooperated with communists, expanded public works, and presided over a wartime sugar boom fueled by Allied demand. Lechón asado fit the moment well. Pork was available. Wages rose modestly. Holidays were celebrated loudly. The feast felt earned. Yet even then, contradictions simmered. Sugar wealth remained concentrated. Rural poverty persisted beneath urban growth. The constitution promised more than the state delivered. The pig roasted, but the fire beneath it was uneven.

The years between 1944 and 1952 are often remembered as a lost democratic interlude, but they were more fragile than nostalgic memory suggests. Corruption flourished. Political parties hollowed out. Patronage replaced reform. U.S. companies deepened their hold on sugar, utilities, and land. Seasonal unemployment in the countryside remained brutal. In sugar towns, workers labored intensely during the zafra, then starved through the dead season. Lechón returned to being occasional, not regular, something saved for Christmas or a saint’s day, not evidence of sustained prosperity.

Batista watched this decay from the sidelines, calculating. When he returned to power in March 1952, it was not through elections but a coup. The justification was familiar: chaos, corruption, the need for order. He suspended the constitution he once championed, postponed elections, censored the press, and empowered the military and police. What he offered in return was spectacle, growth statistics, hotel construction, neon Havana nights, and an image of stability that played well abroad. Batista’s second regime was not built on reform but on reassurance: to investors, to tourists, to the United States. And lechón asado, rebranded as a symbol of Cuban joy, fit neatly into that narrative.

In Havana, casinos multiplied. American money flowed through hotels and racetracks. Advertisements promised a playground of rum, music, and endless feasts. Whole pigs turned on spits at official banquets and tourist restaurants, their skins lacquered, their flesh perfumed. To outsiders, Cuba looked full. But fullness was staged. In the countryside, wages stagnated. Small farmers lost land. Sugar workers endured unemployment for months at a time. Malnutrition was common. The pig on display concealed empty pots elsewhere.

This was Batista’s betrayal of the working class: not an open assault at first, but abandonment masked by celebration. Labor laws were selectively enforced. Independent unions were harassed or co-opted. Strikes were broken by police violence. Student activists were surveilled, beaten, disappeared. Rural guards enforced order on behalf of mill owners and landlords. The regime’s legitimacy no longer rested on promises of justice but on the appearance of prosperity, and appearances require constant reinforcement.

Lechón asado returned, quietly, to its older meaning in rural Cuba. Away from hotel patios and political rallies, pigs were roasted not as symbols of national success but as acts of mutual survival. Neighbors pooled resources. Families saved for months. The feast mattered precisely because everyday life was thin. Cooking a whole pig was labor-intensive and time-consuming; it required patience, vigilance, and collective effort. It was not fast food for a fast-growing economy. It was slow food in a stalled one.

As repression intensified after 1955, following attacks on the regime, rising student protests, and rural insurgency, the gap between spectacle and reality widened dangerously. Batista responded not with reform but with terror. Police killings became routine. Torture chambers filled. Newspapers printed blank spaces where censored stories should have been. The countryside, long neglected, became openly hostile. The same rural communities that gathered around lechón fires now whispered names, shared rumors, hid fugitives. The feast became a meeting point, a place where talk could stretch as long as the roasting time.

Lechón’s symbolism sharpened in this period. The pig must be cooked slowly or it fails. Rushing ruins it. Batista’s Cuba rushed growth without redistribution, order without legitimacy, celebration without justice. The result was brittle, like skin crackling too fast over too hot a fire, impressive at first bite, hollow beneath. By 1957, the regime still staged abundance, but fewer believed it. The working class had been promised dignity and delivered performance. They had been invited to the table as decoration, not as equals.

The immediate aftermath of Batista’s mid-1950s consolidation was not yet revolution, but it was no longer consent. Trust had been burned away. The countryside was restless. Students were radicalized. Workers were angry and increasingly willing to risk repression

When Cuba finally tipped into open rebellion, it would not be Havana’s casinos that carried the movement forward, but the countryside that had long known how to wait, how to endure, and how to gather around a fire without mistaking smoke for nourishment.

You’ve never had pork that’s tasted quite like lechón asado.

Lechón Asado (Cuban Mojo-Marinated Roast Pork)

Ingredients

Pork:

2–3 lb boneless pork shoulder or loin roast

Mojo Marinade:

⅓ cup sour orange juice (or 3 tbsp orange juice + 1½ tbsp lime juice)
4 cloves garlic, minced
½ large onion, thinly sliced
3 tbsp olive oil
1½ tbsp white vinegar
1½ tsp dried oregano
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp salt
½ tsp black pepper
Optional: pinch crushed red pepper

Instructions

Whisk together all marinade ingredients.
Pat pork dry, season lightly with salt/pepper/oregano/cumin if desired, then place in a bag or dish. Pour marinade over, including onions/garlic. Refrigerate 8–24 hours, turning occasionally.
Preheat oven to 325°F (163°C). Remove pork from marinade (reserve liquid/onions). Place pork in a roasting pan, spoon some onions/marinade on top. Cover loosely with foil.
Roast 1½–2¼ hours until internal temperature reaches 145–160°F (juicy to shreddable). Uncover last 15–20 minutes for browning.
Meanwhile, simmer reserved marinade 5–10 minutes to make a sauce.
Rest pork 15 minutes, slice or shred, and serve with warm mojo sauce and onions. Pair with congrí, yuca, or tostones.

Tostones con Mojo Ajo: The Crunch of a Broken Silence

Plantains arrived in Cuba through the same circuits that brought enslaved Africans, sugar, and survival cuisines. They thrived where other crops struggled and became a staple across the Caribbean. Green plantains, unlike their sweet yellow counterparts, were not dessert or luxury. They were starch, filler, sustenance. Tostones emerged from necessity: frying tough green plantains made them edible, smashing them maximized surface area, frying them again ensured crunch and keeping quality. They could be cooked quickly in batches, shared cheaply, eaten standing in streets or doorways. Garlic sauce, made from ingredients that stored well and required no refrigeration, transformed them from bland survival food into something assertive and communal. This was working food, food of laborers, dockworkers, vendors, students, and by the end of the 1950s, those workers were ready to rise.

By the mid-1950s, Cuba itself had been fried once and pressed flat by Batista’s second dictatorship. The promises of 1940 were long gone. The constitution was suspended. Elections were meaningless or postponed. Political parties functioned only insofar as they did not threaten the regime. The state had become nakedly coercive. Police and military intelligence infiltrated unions, campuses, and neighborhoods. Torture and extrajudicial killings were no longer whispered rumors but known facts. What had once been repression justified as “order” increasingly looked like occupation.

For the working class, the pressure was relentless and cumulative. Sugar workers still faced brutal seasonal unemployment. Urban wages lagged behind inflation. Housing shortages worsened as rural migrants crowded into Havana seeking work that didn’t exist. U.S. corporations dominated utilities and industry, extracting profit while the state subsidized their stability. Corruption was not incidental; it was structural. Bribes replaced rights. Silence became a survival strategy. Batista’s Cuba was loud with music and quiet with fear.

In this atmosphere, food habits shifted subtly but meaningfully. Tostones fit the rhythm of a society under surveillance. They could be cooked fast, eaten fast, shared without ceremony. Street vendors sold them wrapped in paper. Homes prepared them while radios murmured censored news. Garlic sauce, pungent, unmistakable, cut through the blandness imposed by scarcity. It was flavor that refused to be discreet.

Resistance was also shifting. By 1956 and 1957, opposition to Batista was no longer confined to isolated student protests or rural insurgency. It was becoming coordinated. Underground networks linked labor unions, student groups, and political organizations. Sabotage increased. Police stations were attacked. Regime violence intensified in response, creating a feedback loop of repression and defiance. What remained uncertain was whether the working class, still fragmented, still vulnerable, could act collectively again, as it had in earlier decades.

The answer came in August 1957 with the General Strike.

The strike was not spontaneous. It was the product of months of clandestine organizing under extraordinary risk. Workers in transport, utilities, industry, and commerce were asked to do something both simple and terrifying: stop. Stop buses. Stop factories. Stop electricity. Stop the appearance of normal life. In a dictatorship that relied on the illusion of stability, paralysis was a weapon.

When the strike began, it was uneven but unmistakable. Transportation halted in key cities. Shops closed. Power flickered. Streets emptied not from fear alone but from collective decision. For a brief moment, Batista’s Cuba experienced what it would look like without compliance. The regime responded with predictable brutality. Soldiers were deployed. Strike leaders were arrested, tortured, killed. The press blamed “communist agitators.” The machinery of the state lurched back into motion through force.

Militarily, the strike failed. It did not topple Batista. It did not sustain itself long enough to create a vacuum of power. But symbolically, it shattered something essential: the myth that the working class had been pacified. The regime could repress guerrillas in the countryside and assassinate students in the streets, but a coordinated stoppage exposed its dependence on the very people it had betrayed. The dictatorship survived the strike, but it did not recover from what it revealed.

In the immediate aftermath, Batista tightened his grip. Surveillance expanded. Labor organizations were further constrained. Fear returned, heavier than before. But something had changed. Workers had seen their collective power, even in defeat. They had learned that obedience was not natural; it was enforced. The strike became a reference point whispered in factories and neighborhoods, a reminder that the regime’s control was not total.

Everyday life absorbed this lesson. Meals remained modest. Tostones continued to be fried in kitchens and on street corners. Garlic continued to be pounded into sauce with mortar and pestle, the smell filling small rooms. These were not acts of rebellion in themselves, but they were acts of continuity. They preserved communal habits in a society the state was trying to atomize. Eating tostones meant sharing oil, space, time. It meant standing together, even briefly.

Crucially, the General Strike of 1957 reframed the coming struggle. It demonstrated that urban workers were not merely spectators to rural insurgency. They were participants, capable of coordinated action. The regime understood this, which is why it responded with such ferocity. But repression is a blunt instrument. It can crush action, but it cannot erase memory.

By the end of 1957, Batista’s dictatorship still stood, but it stood differently, more isolated, more reliant on violence, less able to claim legitimacy. The working class had been pushed, flattened, and forced back into the fire. They emerged not victorious, but transformed.

You’ve likely had tostones. Especially, if you’ve followed along cooking with the blog, you made them with hogao (called patacones) for the Columbia section. Try them now with garlic sauce. Its like a completely different dish.

Tostones con Mojo de Ajo (Fried Green Plantains with Garlic Sauce)

Ingredients

Tostones:

2–3 green plantains
Vegetable oil, for frying
Salt

Garlic Sauce:

4 cloves garlic, minced
¼ cup olive oil
2 tbsp lime juice
Salt, to taste

Instructions

Peel plantains and cut into 1-inch thick rounds.
Heat oil to 350°F. Fry rounds 2–3 minutes until lightly golden. Drain.
Flatten each piece (using a tostonera or glass bottom).
Fry again 2–3 minutes until crispy and deep golden. Sprinkle with salt.
For sauce: Gently warm olive oil, add garlic and cook briefly until fragrant (don’t brown). Remove from heat, stir in lime juice and salt.
Serve tostones hot with dipping sauce.

Medianoche & Cubano: Pressed at the Hour of Victory

The Cubano sandwich did not originate as a nationalist symbol. It emerged from migration and labor. Cuban workers in Florida, particularly in Tampa and Miami, assembled it from the foods they knew and the ingredients available to them in cigar factories and cafeterías. It returned to Cuba not as an import of exile but as a working-class staple, already shaped by displacement and endurance. The Medianoche, its sweeter cousin, built on the same structure but substituted a soft, eggy bread associated with Havana’s nightlife. It was eaten late, after work, after music, after hours spent under artificial light. Both sandwiches were portable, filling, and affordable. They could be eaten standing, shared, wrapped in paper. They belonged to laborers, musicians, night workers, and students. They were not rural dishes and not elite cuisine. They lived in the city, between shifts and conversations, and the only difference between the two is the bread that was used.

By the time of the failed General Strike of 1957, Cuba’s opposition to Batista had already moved beyond isolated rebellion. The strike exposed the regime’s dependence on compliance, but it also revealed the limits of urban labor action under a police state. The aftermath was brutal. Surveillance intensified. Torture and executions escalated. Batista survived, but legitimacy did not. The question that followed was not whether resistance would continue, but where it would cohere.

The answer had been forming since 1953, in the aftermath of an earlier failure. On July 26 of that year, a group of young militants led by Fidel Castro attacked the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The assault was militarily disastrous. Many were killed. Others were captured and tortured. Castro himself was imprisoned, where he delivered his now-famous courtroom defense, later circulated as History Will Absolve Me. The movement that took its name from that failed assault, the 26th of July Movement, was born not from victory, but from survival. It was a coalition before it was an army: students, professionals, peasants, workers, and disillusioned nationalists bound together less by ideology than by shared refusal.

After an amnesty freed Castro and others in 1955, exile and preparation followed. In Mexico, the movement regrouped, training a small guerrilla force that would return to Cuba aboard the Granma in late 1956. The landing was another disaster. Most were killed or captured. Fewer than two dozen fighters escaped into the Sierra Maestra mountains. By conventional logic, the movement should have ended there.

Instead, it adapted. Guerrilla warfare in the countryside combined with underground networks in the cities. Students organized protests. Workers hid weapons. Sabotage disrupted infrastructure. The rural insurgency and urban resistance were not always coordinated, but they were increasingly complementary. The General Strike of 1957, though unsuccessful, demonstrated the potential power of labor. The guerrilla campaign demonstrated endurance. Together, they suggested a path forward that neither could sustain alone.

In 1958, Batista attempted to crush the guerrillas with a massive summer offensive. It failed. Corruption hollowed out the army. Morale collapsed. Soldiers deserted or surrendered. The regime’s violence alienated even those who feared revolution. Meanwhile, the 26th of July Movement broadened its appeal, promising not abstract ideology but concrete change: an end to dictatorship, restoration of the constitution, land reform, sovereignty. It was deliberately pluralistic, allowing liberals, radicals, Catholics, and communists to coexist under a shared objective. The movement was not uniform, but it was pressed together by necessity.

By late 1958, the balance had shifted irreversibly. Guerrilla columns moved out of the mountains and toward the cities. Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos led decisive campaigns in central Cuba, cutting the island in two. Urban resistance intensified. Batista, increasingly isolated, fled the country in the early hours of January 1, 1959.

The revolution entered Havana not as a single force, but as an accumulation. Workers poured into the streets. Students marched. Soldiers defected. The city itself seemed to exhale. For many, the moment felt less like conquest than release, the sudden lifting of a weight that had pressed down for years. Cafeterías reopened under new ownership. Radios played uncensored news. Conversations that had once been whispered were spoken aloud.

Food followed politics quickly. The Cubano sandwich, already ubiquitous, took on new meaning. It had always been a food of labor, but now it symbolized unity. It was eaten by people who had not fought together but now stood on the same side of history. The Medianoche, associated with nightlife and pleasure, reflected the city’s return to itself. Havana was awake again, not just after midnight, but politically. The revolution had not yet solidified into policy or doctrine; it was still a shared feeling, a collective breath held and released.

The immediate aftermath of 1959 was fluid, uncertain, and deeply hopeful. Revolutionary tribunals addressed the crimes of the old regime, often controversially. Land reform laws were drafted. The old constitution was invoked as a promise, even as new structures formed. Alliances that had held under pressure began to strain as questions of direction emerged. But in these early months, the revolution was still defined more by what it had ended than by what it would become.

Cubano’s and medianoches are classic sandwiches

Cubano & Medianoche Sandwiches

Makes: 4 sandwiches

Ingredients

Cuban bread or crusty baguette for Cubano; sweet egg bread (like brioche or medianoche bread) for Medianoche
Yellow mustard
8–12 slices Swiss cheese
8 slices roast pork (preferably lechón)
8 slices deli ham
Dill pickle slices
Softened butter

Instructions

Slice bread into sections and split lengthwise. Spread mustard on both sides.
Layer: ham, roast pork, Swiss cheese, pickles.
Close sandwich and butter the exterior.
Heat a skillet or press over medium. Press sandwiches (using a heavy pan or panini press) and cook 3–4 minutes per side until bread is golden and cheese melts.
Slice diagonally and serve hot.

Croquetas Cubanas: Learning to Read the Revolution

Croquetas are rooted in Spanish culinary traditions that crossed the Atlantic with colonialism. In Spain, croquetas were a way to stretch leftovers in aristocratic households and convents alike. In Cuba, they were quickly absorbed into urban working-class life, especially in Havana, where café culture, bakeries, and lunch counters fed clerks, dockworkers, seamstresses, and students on short breaks and tighter budgets. By the mid-20th century, croquetas were already a staple of the Cuban city, cheap protein, easy to fry, easy to sell, easy to eat standing up.

After January 1959, that ordinariness became political.

The overthrow of Batista did not immediately produce a finished system. The early revolutionary government was improvisational, fast-moving, and uncertain of its final shape. Power consolidated rapidly, but ideology lagged behind events. In 1959 and 1960, reforms arrived in waves: agrarian reform laws broke up large estates; foreign-owned utilities and industries were nationalized; rents were reduced; access to healthcare and education expanded. These policies were not abstract. They reorganized daily life. Bakeries, lunch counters, and cafeterías were brought under state control or cooperative management. Prices were regulated. Food access became a matter of social responsibility rather than private profit.

This is where croquetas mattered.

Unlike celebratory dishes tied to festivals or rural abundance, croquetas thrived under conditions of constraint. They could be made from rationed ingredients. They required no elaborate presentation. They were consistent. In a society undergoing rapid transformation, and soon, tightening external pressure, consistency mattered. Croquetas became a standard offering in state-run cafeterías that fed construction workers, factory laborers, and office employees now absorbed into the machinery of the new state. Served with coffee or alongside rice and beans, they were fuel, not indulgence.

By 1960, Cuba’s relationship with the United States had collapsed. Trade embargoes hardened. Imports vanished. Scarcity, once unevenly distributed, became collective. The revolution responded not by retreating from mass mobilization, but by accelerating it. If material goods were limited, human capacity was not. The state turned decisively toward education as both necessity and ideology.

In 1961, Fidel Castro declared the Year of Education. The Cuban Literacy Campaign, Campaña Nacional de Alfabetización, was not a gradual reform. It was a mobilization on a national scale. Over 250,000 volunteers were recruited, trained, and dispatched across the island. Most were young: students barely into their teens, urban workers sent into the countryside, women who had never before left their neighborhoods. They traveled to remote mountain villages and isolated farms, carrying lanterns, notebooks, primers, and a new sense of purpose. Their task was simple and immense: teach every Cuban who could not read or write to do so within a single year.

The campaign was not separate from daily life. It was daily life. Volunteers lived with peasant families, worked in the fields by day, and taught by night. Lessons were held after dinner, under kerosene lamps, after exhausting labor. Food was shared. What there was, there was together. In these conditions, croquetas made sense. They could be prepared in bulk, transported easily, and eaten without ceremony. In urban centers, cafeterías fed literacy workers before deployment. In rural areas, variations emerged, simpler, rougher, made with what could be spared. The form held even when the ingredients changed.

Croquetas mirrored the campaign’s logic. Literacy, like béchamel, was a binding agent. It took disparate individuals, peasants and students, women and men, rural and urban, and folded them into a shared structure. The primers taught reading through revolutionary language: words like patria, reforma, cooperativa. Learning to read was not framed as personal advancement alone, but as entry into collective life. Illiteracy was defined not as individual failure, but as a social injustice inherited from the old order.

By the end of 1961, Cuba declared itself free of illiteracy. Estimates suggest literacy rates jumped from roughly 60 percent to over 96 percent in a single year. The claim was both statistical and symbolic. In December, hundreds of thousands gathered in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, holding pencils aloft like weapons surrendered. It was a theatrical moment, but not an empty one. The campaign had reorganized how Cubans understood participation. Education was no longer confined to classrooms or credentials. It was labor. It was service. It was proof of belonging.

Croquetas remained quietly present throughout this transformation. They did not headline speeches. They were not commemorated in murals. They were eaten between shifts, between lessons, between meetings. Their anonymity was their power. In a society that increasingly emphasized equality, croquetas erased hierarchy at the level of food. Everyone ate the same shape, the same portion, the same crust. What differed; who made them, where the ingredients came from, was submerged beneath breading and oil.

The immediate aftermath of the Literacy Campaign was not calm. 1961 was also the year of the Bay of Pigs invasion, when U.S.-backed exiles attempted to overthrow the revolutionary government. The invasion failed, decisively. Its aftermath accelerated Cuba’s alignment with the Soviet Union and hardened internal discipline. Revolutionary optimism coexisted with siege mentality. Mass organizations expanded. Political education intensified. The revolution, once plural and improvisational, became more centralized and doctrinal.

In this tightening environment, everyday institutions mattered more than ever. Cafeterías, schools, factories, and ration stores were where the revolution was lived, not theorized. Croquetas continued to circulate through these spaces, linking nourishment to routine. They were part of the rhythm of a society learning to function under pressure: work, study, eat, organize, repeat.

Croquetas are easy to make and delicious!

Croquetas Cubanas (Ham Croquettes)

Makes: 20–24

Ingredients

4 tbsp butter
½ small onion, finely minced
½ cup all-purpose flour
1½ cups warm milk
1 cup finely minced cooked ham
¼ tsp nutmeg
Salt and pepper
2 eggs, beaten (for breading)
1½ cups breadcrumbs
Oil, for frying

Instructions

Melt butter, sauté onion until soft. Stir in flour to make roux; cook 1–2 minutes. Gradually whisk in milk until very thick. Fold in ham, nutmeg, salt/pepper. Cook until mixture pulls from pan sides.
Spread on a tray, cool, then chill 2–3 hours until firm.
Shape into small cylinders. Dip in egg, then breadcrumbs.
Fry in 350°F oil 2–3 minutes until golden. Drain and serve hot (great with lime or mustard).

Arroz Congrí (Moros y Christianos): Eating Through the End of the World

Congrí, known in much of Cuba as Moros y Cristianos (Moors and Christians), is a relic of the Spanish Reconquista, the centuries-long struggle between the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula and the Muslim Moors of North Africa. In the pot, the black beans represented the Moors and the white rice the Christians. It was a culinary metaphor for a forced and bloody coexistence, brought to the Caribbean by Spanish colonizers who found that the local black beans and imported rice thrived in the tropical heat. In the hands of the Cuban people, the dish was stripped of its religious war and reimagined as a marriage of Spanish and African influences. It became the bedrock of the Cuban table, a culinary constant that was a bedrock of working class practicality.

By the time Cuba entered the 1990s, practicality was no longer enough. Survival itself became the organizing principle of daily life.

The decades between the Literacy Campaign of 1961 and the collapse of the Soviet Union were years of relative stability, if not abundance. Literacy had integrated the population into the state; now the state promised security in return. Cuba’s alignment with the USSR brought guaranteed markets for sugar, subsidized oil, machinery, fertilizer, and food imports. The system was rigid and inefficient, but it functioned. Rationing normalized scarcity without catastrophe. A generation grew up assuming the lights would stay on, buses would run, and food, limited, repetitive, but sufficient, would appear.

Congrí existed during these years, but it was not yet symbolic. It was simply dinner.

That illusion shattered almost overnight.

Between 1989 and 1991, the Eastern Bloc collapsed. The Berlin Wall fell. Soviet client states unraveled. In December 1991, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. For Cuba, this was not an ideological event, it was an economic extinction. Overnight, the island lost roughly 80 percent of its foreign trade. Oil imports dropped catastrophically. Sugar prices collapsed. Spare parts vanished. Factories shut down. Tractors rusted where they stood. Refrigerators went dark. The revolution, built on a tightly centralized system dependent on external lifelines, suddenly found itself alone.

The Cuban government named what followed El Período Especial en Tiempo de Paz, the Special Period in Time of Peace. The phrase itself was revealing. The country was not at war, but it was treated as if it were. Emergency measures became permanent. Austerity was no longer ideological; it was unavoidable.

Daily life contracted.

Electricity was rationed in long blackouts. Public transportation nearly collapsed, replaced by bicycles imported from China and improvised hitchhiking networks. Meat all but disappeared. Milk became scarce even for children. Cooking oil vanished. Soap thinned. Shoes were repaired until they dissolved. People lost weight, not metaphorically, but physically. Studies later estimated that the average Cuban lost between 5 and 25 percent of their body weight during the early 1990s. Hunger was not spectacular. It was chronic, dull, and exhausting.

This is where congrí mattered.

Rice and beans were not abundant, but they were obtainable. Both could be rationed, substituted, diluted. Black beans, when cooked slowly, could flavor large volumes of rice. A small amount of fat, when available, went far. Congrí did not require meat to feel complete. It did not pretend to luxury. It simply filled the stomach and allowed the body to keep going.

Beans were stretched with pumpkin. Rice portions shrank, but the pot remained. The dish could be cooked on kerosene burners, charcoal, or improvised stoves when electricity failed. It could feed a family from a single pot and be reheated endlessly. In the Special Period, congrí stopped being one dish among many and became the center of the plate.

The Special Period also forced a reorganization of Cuban society that echoed, in a harsher register, the mobilizations of the early revolution. The state decentralized out of necessity. Large industrial agriculture collapsed without fuel or fertilizer. In its place rose organopónicos, urban gardens carved out of empty lots, sidewalks, and former parking spaces. Havana became a patchwork of raised beds and compost piles. Workers who had once operated machines now grew lettuce. Agronomy became local knowledge again.

Congrí reflected this return to basics. It did not belong to factories or cafeterías anymore; it belonged to kitchens, to neighborhoods, to whatever ingredients could be coaxed from the soil. Beans grown nearby. Rice rationed carefully. Seasonings improvised. The dish absorbed scarcity without complaint.

The ideological tone of the state shifted as well. The confident rhetoric of the 1970s gave way to appeals for sacrifice and unity. Fidel Castro spoke openly of hunger, of mistakes, of endurance. The revolution no longer promised a radiant future. It promised survival. Literacy had once been the binding agent of participation; now it was improvisation.

Congrí, once ordinary, became symbolic precisely because it did not change. When so much else vanished, meat, fuel, imports, certainty, this dish remained recognizable. It tasted like continuity. It tasted like home.

There is a reason the metaphor of moros y cristianos endured during this time. The name itself, inherited from Spain’s medieval history, refers to coexistence through conflict: Moors and Christians, black and white, bound together uneasily but inseparably. In the Special Period, the metaphor shifted. Congrí became the image of a population forced to endure together, regardless of belief, privilege, or fatigue. Everyone waited in the same ration lines. Everyone learned new ways to cook old food. Everyone was hungry.

The aftermath of the Special Period did not arrive cleanly. By the mid-to-late 1990s, Cuba began to stabilize through painful concessions. The U.S. dollar was legalized. Tourism was expanded aggressively. Foreign investment returned selectively. Inequality reemerged in visible ways, those with access to dollars ate differently than those without. Congrí remained, but it now marked a divide: some ate it by necessity, others by memory.

Still, the worst had passed. Famine had been avoided. The state had not collapsed. The social fabric, strained nearly to breaking, held.

This rice and bean dish is closely related to other Caribbean rice and bean dishes such as Puerto Rican Arroz con Gandules and Jamaican Rice and Peas. Its also similarly delicious.

Arroz Congrí (Moros y Cristianos – Black Beans and Rice)

Ingredients

1 cup dried black beans (or 1 (15 oz) can undrained + ½ cup water)
1½ cups long-grain white rice, rinsed
3–4 slices bacon (or 2 tbsp olive oil/pork fat)
1 small onion, diced
1 green bell pepper, diced
3–4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ground cumin
½ tsp dried oregano
1 tsp smoked paprika (optional)
1 bay leaf
2½ cups bean cooking liquid (or water)
Salt, pepper, and 1–2 tbsp red wine vinegar

Instructions

If using dried: Soak overnight, then simmer with bay leaf until tender (~1 hour). Reserve liquid.
Cook bacon until crisp; remove, leave fat. Sauté onion, pepper, garlic, cumin, oregano, paprika, bay leaf until fragrant.
Add rice, toast 1–2 minutes. Stir in beans and 2½ cups liquid. Season.
Bring to boil, reduce to low, cover, and cook 18–20 minutes until rice is tender. Rest 5–10 minutes off heat.
Fluff, stir in vinegar, and serve.

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