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How Cooking in Cuba Prepared Me for the Pandemic
Now that I’m back in the U.S., reminders of my former Soviet-style life are popping up all around me
It was the summer of 2016, and my family and I were living in Havana, Cuba. I was pushing my young daughter in a shopping cart in an abnormally warm supermarket filled with sweaty shoppers; I was looking for eggs. My black-market guy had already told me he’d exhausted his supply, and earlier that day, I’d checked the farmers markets and our local public food distribution center to return home empty-handed. This supermarket — where eggs went for triple the price as elsewhere — was my last hope.
Alas, when we reached the shelves of the refrigerated section, we found them nearly empty, with no eggs to be seen. But my daughter’s eyes lit up at the sight of the section’s one recent, lone shipment: a huge stack of plastic cups of sweetened, processed yogurt that reminded her of life back in the United States.
“Yogurt, mommy!” she said.
“But we make yogurt at home,” I reminded her.
Yes, but my yogurt didn’t come in flavors like strawberry and mango, like these, she said. Then taking another tack, my daughter — already resourceful at age 4 — coaxed me into buying the treat after employing a mantra I’d adopted in Cuba: “But Mommy … when you see it, buy it!”
Four years later, as we find ourselves in the middle of a pandemic and facing shortages in the United States, that phrase has come back to haunt me. Reminders of my former Soviet-style life in Cuba are popping up all around us. One recent afternoon, I was driving around Alexandria, Virginia — where we’ve temporarily relocated to ride out this protracted storm— and I was again looking for eggs … and paper towels, flour, and yeast. Our local Giant didn’t have the items. At Target, the paper products aisle was cleared out except for one lone package of toilet paper that no one wanted, perhaps because it’d been touched too many times. The baking aisle had plenty of mixes but was devoid of white flour, bread flour, whole wheat flour, and yeast.
