Unlimited ice cream for communists

Unlimited
Ice Cream for
Communists
kaitlin
harlow

Unlimited ice cream for communists
W
hile I was in Cuba, I never stopped sweating. The aggressive Caribbean
sunshine turned my skin into an open, breathing organism. Through
my sweating pores I absorbed salty gales along the Malecón, where the
hot pink setting sun turned hundreds of meandering pedestrians into black silhouettes against the
choppy Pacific Ocean. I soaked up scalding black exhaust spurting out of electric-green
Volkswagens in downtown Old Havana. And degree by degree, as the sun burned ceaselessly down
through my seven-day trip, I gradually absorbed curious insights into the lives of my new Cuban
friends.
I was in Havana for seven days on a trip with my seven closest friends. It was our last spring
break in college, and as seniors we had no reason to shy away from the considerable cost,
coordination, and logistics of pulling off an international escapade together. There was only one
destination in our collective dreams: Cuba. Our friend Gaby was moving to Cuba that same week to
be with Laura, her long-distance Cuban girlfriend, at long last.

Gaby and Laura were our perfect ambassadors to Cuba for three reasons. First, they were
extremely excited that this trip was even taking place: it was a small miracle that all of Gaby’s best
friends in college decided to fly to Cuba and experience Gaby’s new home. Second, Laura had lived
in Havana her whole life, and Gaby was a Sagittarius like me, which meant she was a master of
travel and exploration. Their collective mental map of the city was studded with a commendable
constellation of dive bars, breakfast cafés, and cultural sites.
Gaby and Laura were waiting for us with a yellow taxi van when we exited La Havana
International. We all squinted our eyes reflexively, having zoomed from a 40-degree chill in North
Carolina to 80 degrees of direct sunshine.
On our taxi ride through the outskirts of Havana, everyone was hypnotized by the view
through the rose-tinted windows. Everywhere I looked was cinematic. Men wearing only gym
shorts and flip flops smoked cigarettes on the balconies of magnificent old mansions, with mint
green gilded facades and patches of disintegrated plaster. A small gray-haired woman rested on a
park bench and sprinkled rice on the ground for the street cats swarming at her feet. A lady in a
bright blue dress rolled a wooden wagon full of fresh-cut flowers in every color down the uneven
cobblestone streets.
But the very first thing I noticed took me completely by surprise: picturesque vintage cars
everywhere. We passed a parking lot where each and every space was occupied by a hot pink
convertible.
When Americans think of Cuba, they visualize old cars. We imagine an entire rainbow fleet
of Beetles and Bugs and Volkswagens. Based on their camera rolls, it seems like all tourists and
visiting photographers encounter a lime green punch-buggie around every corner. I, a selfdescribed
“woke traveler,” had rolled my eyes at these images. How basic, how reductive, how
cliché!
2

“Raise your hand if you’re surprised that there are actually this many vintage cars in Cuba!” I
exclaimed, turning towards my friends in the backseat. They stared back at me unphased.
“I’m surprised at how many new cars there are,” said Keely, pointing out the 90s-era sedans
stopped at a red light. When and how had automobile imports restarted, she wondered? An
interesting question— the first of hundreds that we would ask about our unfamiliar surroundings.
But our phones never had service, and we never bought public Wifi-access cards that Cubans use to
connect to the internet in parks and town squares. Estranged from Google and Siri, my friends and I
were emerging into what we named “post-truth society.” The answer to any question was simply
whatever you thought might be the answer.
From the very beginning of that initial taxi ride into Havana, I was filled with a yearning to
know this place. I wanted to live there on this strange Caribbean island long enough to feel like I did
about Mexico after I created my own world there for six months. As if I belonged, and understood,
and could recognize these streets and these landmarks and these people.
---
That first day in Havana was hot. Walking around the city for the first time in the late
afternoon, we darted to the shady side of each street for temporary relief from the heat. Gaby and
Laura led the way: sometimes holding hands, sometimes turning to us to gesture at a notable
landmark and offer at tour-guide spiel. The U.S. Embassy, menacing and ugly, isolated by the ocean
and challenged by a long plaza to its north called “Anti-imperialist park.” The house Gaby first lived
in when she studied abroad at the University of Havana sophomore year. Laura’s favorite spot for
cheap student food (cheesy pizza or ham-and-cheese sandwiches).
I kept giving Ana and Keely looks as we strolled behind the couple. It was the first time we
had ever seen them together, a real-life incarnation of their stunning Instagram portraits. We’d all
3

known Gaby for years, and to finally witness her with the girl of her dreams left us all “awwwww”-
ing at one another like a row of moms at their wedding ceremony.
But while Cuba was a fever dream of off-the-beaten-path global experiences to us, Gaby and
Laura had actual lives in Havana. A job. School. Apartment-hunting. Our intrepid American clique
had to fend for ourselves for at least part of every day. After taking us to devour 50-cent pizzas at a
popular student haunt, Gaby and Laura taxied away to continue their search for an apartment to
move into together. It was 4 p.m. and here we were. In Cuba, sans our Cuban guides.
Uncomfortably hot and stuffed with pizza, wondering aloud about the currency conversion and
how we didn’t expect the street food to be so… Italian. I felt a familiar giddiness tugging my lips into
a smile: we were on our own in a brand-new place, with nothing to do but explore!
From our table outside the café, we could see the mysterious white concrete curves of a vast
building of some kind through the trees of the park nearby.
“Is that Coppelia?” asked Luke. Gaby and Laura had told us we were close to one of Havana’s
most popular landmarks, the official ice cream headquarters of the state.
“YES!” I said, a little too loudly, thrilled about what I had heard about this place called
Coppelia. An authentic Cuban ice cream experience was my only goal for the entire trip.
My sweet tooth is the stuff of friendly legend. For my twentieth birthday last year, my
friends taped Smarties and lollipops all over the walls of our house. For my twenty-first this year, I
feasted upon not one but three birthday cakes. I’m not sure how or when loving sugar became an
assigned aspect of my identity, but it probably originated with my longest standing personality trait:
the tendency to exaggerate. Sometimes I roll my eyes when my friends tease me about my adoration
of dessert, but even if it’s a bit hyperbolic, I certainly never complained about the bottomless candy
supply in my backpack for six straight weeks after my birthday. Much to my delight, Cubans seemed
to appreciate sweet treats just as much as me.
4

The legendary Coppelia squats magnificently over an entire city block in Vedado, a
neighborhood about a twenty-minute walk from the regal University of Havana and the pastel
babbling waterfall of commerce and tourists in Old Havana. Coppelia’s benevolent reign over the
citizens of Cuba began in 1966 as a personal project of Fidel Castro and his right-hand-woman Celia
Sánchez. Historical mythology holds that Castro was a devoted ice cream lover. He once ordered his
Canadian ambassador to ship him every flavor of Howard Johnson’s ice cream; after sampling all
twenty-eight containers, he made it his personal mission for Cuba to develop an ice cream culture
to rival the American companies. Cuba would have the best frozen treats in all of the Caribbean,
and thanks to the Revolution, it would be accessible to all.
In the first several years after the Revolution, Castro and his revolutionary government
tried to reverse the steep socioeconomic divide and social insecurity sown by the authoritarian
regime they’d overthrown. The reforms that the new thirty-something-year-old state authorities
gallantly unleashed on Cuba sound fantastically utopian: elegant mansions taken from rich owners
and turned over to the renters, farmland distributed to the farmers who worked it, free universal
healthcare. Castro’s revolutionary Robin Hood government preached socialist progressive ideals of
equality, justice, internationalism and anti-imperialism.
But the island utopia had powerful enemies. The U.S. president refused to meet with Castro
when he visited the states soon after taking power; the U.S. cut diplomatic ties with Cuba and
imposed a trade embargo in 1962, shoving in a damaging wedge between the nations that blocks
any kind of mutually beneficial relationship; it has endured for five decades. Though most
Americans have only heard of Bay of Pigs, the CIA launched many other missions to undermine
their closest enemy: dropping swine flu and dengue fever on the island, bombing a department
store, separating Cuban children from their families and adopting them into American families.
While feuding with their antagonistic neighbor from above, Cuba needed economic support
and imported goods to supplement the limited production and weak economy of the small
5

Caribbean island. It willingly nestled under the Soviet wing. For the first time, Castro replaced his
label of “revolutionary” and “socialist” with “communist.”
And so it was until the 1990s, when the Soviet Bloc collapsed, and Cuba’s chief trading
partners and financial support suddenly dropped out from underneath them. This was the catalyst
that began the “Special Period”: more than ten years of scarcity and austerity.
Older Cubans swear that Coppelia’s ice cream has never been the same since the economic
crisis of the Special Period. Cuba’s limited bovine population could only make so much milk, and
without powdered milk from East Germany and butter from the Soviet Union, the official state ice
cream formula must have suffered. But Coppelia never once ceased to dish out sweet, indulgent
ensaladas. Official grocery rations no longer included bottled milk, but Cubans could join the evergrowing
lines outside of Coppelia and enter a sanctuary unlimited by shortage or rations; scoops of
ice cream were always subsidized into costs so low that 10 scoops is the normal order. Even if it’s
not as creamy as the original. Inside Coppelia, the Revolution is still a utopia. Beneath a Celia
Sánchez quote, communal tables are shared, prices are subsidized, long lines are enjoyed with goodnatured
socializing. Most Cubans earn somewhere around $30 a month (the state salary), so it is
unlikely that they can afford to go out to the cafes and restaurants and bars where the cheapest item
on the menu costs a day’s wages. Eat out at the ice cream cathedral, however, and ten scoops will
run you less than 40 cents.
---
Coppelia resembles the unique Cuban architecture of many state-owned buildings sprinkled
throughout Havana. U.S. cities are pointy, tall, and shiny, built out of sharp-angled steel; but metal
materials like steel beams are scarce in Cuba, and the alternative cityscape looks whimsical and retro
in comparison. Coppelia is constructed from concrete, all rounded angles and curved lines; thick
concrete columns painted bright white and royal blue form an open-air rotunda, supporting a raised
6

central pavilion in the middle of the complex. A fat, snail-like spiral staircase winds down from this
interior chamber to the main outdoor sections. The whole ice cream spaceship is split into five
individual seating sections. Each section has its own queue snaking along the sidewalks outside the
park.
“Último?” asked a woman in her thirties who had appeared near one of Coppelia’s five
entrance lines and now approached the parade of Cubans leaning against the park fence. Shades of
skin colors in Havana range from porcelain white to deep ebony, and this woman was a deeply
tanned bronze with blonde highlights in her dark brown hair. She was clad in characteristic Havana
fashion: a hot pink tank top stretching skin-tight around the furrows of her belly, zebra print
spandex shorts, yellow flip flops, and big dark sunglasses.
A couple of teenage boys wearing large flashy sneakers and striped short-sleeve polo shirts
gave the woman a wave and a nod.
“Gracías!” said the woman, and she claimed a spot along the fence near the boys. She now
knew who was el último— the last in line— and she could wait wherever she wanted, simply falling
in line behind the boys when the somber security guards ushered a new wave of people into the
blessed shade of the inner Coppelia courtyard.
“Último” is the ritualistic refrain of Cuban line culture. And in a society where queuing up is
a requisite of daily life, “line culture” really matters. If I lived in Havana I’d swelter in long sidewalk
queues for my weekly grocery rations at the public grocery store; for switching colorful bills
between the two official currencies at the money-exchange kiosk; and for ballet shows at the public
theater.
The subtle complexities of line etiquette were lost on me when I first attempted to visit
Coppelia with my gangly gaggle of gringos. We walked right into the park, as confused as a huddle
7

of penguins wandering the white concrete columns. Why were there were so many people milling
about outside the park gates. Surely those weren’t the lines? Why would there be so many lines, so
far away from the entrance? Fifty feet from the serene roped-in seating areas where tables of
Cubans ordered their ice cream salads, three glowering security guards called us out. “CUC?” they
asked. They wanted to know if we were using the expensive tourist currency. We conferred
between ourselves, and told them yes, we had CUC.
They led us to an out=of-the-way iron spiral staircase guarded by a bored looking woman.
Upstairs was a small room with orange walls, too many tables, and a single counter manned by a
man in an apron. He stood up when we entered, and handed me a laminated menu.
The ice cream was $3.50 CUC! Which was about $4 in U.S. dollars! That couldn’t be right.
The whole point of Coppelia was cheap ice cream. Dismayed, I turned around and ushered
everyone back out of the door and down the staircase. It seemed that our first attempt was a failure;
we should have told the security men that we wanted to pay with moneda nacional, Cuban
currency, and not CUC.
This time around, after I explained to the guards that we did have monedas, we were
pointed towards a languishing sidewalk line and we took our place. We didn’t know if we were in
the right place or how long we should wait, but I was determined to have a taste of that ice cream I
glimpsed inside, so I made everyone take a seat on the curb.
I would describe finally entering the center of the Coppelia park as a spiritual experience. A
canopy of banyan trees cooled the pavement below, and after forty-five minutes waiting on the
sunny sidewalk, the speckled shade was as luscious as air conditioning. The couples and families and
solitary diners tucking into their ice cream were quiet; a happy hush enshrouded the courtyard.
The impressive size of the premises combined with this still reverence explains Coppelia’s common
nickname: ice cream cathedral. I’m not religious, but I would worship at the ice cream cathedral
seven days a week.
8

I gazed around me at the bustling scene, an involuntary grin stretching across my sweaty
face. Children, teenagers, adults, and elderly men and women sat at black iron patio tables or
queued up in a patient line nearby to await a stool at the lengthy half-moon shaped counter inside
the pavilion. Waiters ranging in apparent age from sixteen to twenty-five wore black shirts beneath
plain white aprons and strode self-assuredly between tables and the kitchen, repeating customer
requests back to each table: una copa de coco, dos de fresa, una ensalada, gracias.
I saw other tables gliding spoons into slices of a delicious, moist pie something, and I
wondered how much one would cost. Did we have enough Cuban pesos to split one?
As we awaited our waiter we watched a portly man in a graphic t-shirt and shades spoon
innumerable scoops into a round silver bucket on his table.
“Where did that even come from?!” asked Luke.
“I wonder if he brought that himself,” said Keely, looking on in admiration as the man ladled
melting ice cream into his to-go bucket. I would see a few more people do this on other visits to
Coppelia; yes, in fact, they did bring their own vessels for take-out helados.
“Hola buenos días, qué te traigo?” A handsome man appeared by our table and asked briskly for
our order. One by one, in varying degrees of Spanish competency, we asked for our flavors of
choice. I eagerly asked for three, and everyone else ordered just one. The waiter furrowed his brow
when we asked for single-scoops, but he hurried away regardless and was back with our frozen
treats in three minutes flat.
The ice cream was creamy, sugary sweet, and deliciously cold. The cookie crumb topping
was a lovely touch. Our spoons flew as we licked our lips.
When the waiter returned so that we could pay our bill, I asked for our total.
“Nueve,” he said. Nine.
9

“Yes, I know we had nine scoops, but what is the total bill for all of that?” I asked in Spanish.
“Nueve,” he said again. I was confused; maybe my accent wasn’t so good after all. I tried to
clarify again, but Luke interrupted.
“Wait. I think it really is actually just nine monedas for everything. Didn’t Laura say
Coppelia was the equivalent of 4 cents a scoop?”
He was right. We couldn’t believe it. All of that ice cream we had just devoured, for only
nine monedas? A handful of change? Two quarters?
another round.
As the magic of Coppelia dawned on us, we all began to laugh. And we immediately ordered
---
Coppelia line.
One week later, on a cool Sunday evening, I strode up the sidewalk towards that block’s
“Último?” I asked.
“Yo,” answered a ten-year-old girl with two young friends, one hanging off the park gate
and one sitting on the curb. She looked at me curiously, amused by the foreigner casually joining the
local Cuban routine. I smiled at her and joined the line behind them.
I was on my own, finding a spot to queue up and wait while the rest of my friends returned
to our beloved JKL for pizza to quiet their rumbling bellies. I hadn’t eaten lunch either, but I wanted
to save room for ice cream glory. This would be our very last visit to Coppelia; it was our last full
day in Cuba.
Which section of the cathedral was this line for? I hoped it would be the counter stools,
reminiscent of a 1940s soda shop. City life was at a happy Sunday peak: loud ancient taxis and buses
scooting down the street, a long line winding out of the currency conversion shop, groups of
10

Cubans milling about in front of the liquor store and the theater and the other ice cream shop
(where you could get helado for 20 times more than Coppelia but didn’t have to wait). A welldressed
couple—rhinestone hoop earrings and fuchsia lipstick on her, showy red sneakers on him
and a stud in his ear— strutted down the block and called for the Ultimo. I answered, and a few
fellow line-waiters pointed to me. The fuschia-lipped girl, probably about my age, looked at me
with skeptical disdain but moved behind me. Thirty minutes later, after the rest of my friends
joined two-by-two, they snaked around in front of me. I really didn’t blame them for cutting seven
Americans and their two Cuban friends.
Querida Coppelia, Nunca podría expresar que tan agradecida estoy por poder disfrutar este paradiso
único! Dear Coppelia: I could never express just how grateful I am to be able to enjoy this unique
paradise!
So begins the love letter I wrote to Cuba’s national ice cream cathedral as I reclined within
its sacred premises for the last time. I left the absurd little note on the table, sticky from drips of
melted ice cream. We all devoured our scoops of strawberry, coconut, and mantecada helados in
record time, racing the 5-o-clock Cuban heat to clear our plastic orange ice cream boats.
Inside Coppelia, the dream of a revolutionary society is still alive. The stillness and
sweetness accessible to all is unlike anything I will ever encounter in my own fast-paced,
competition-obsessed country. The system of lines and norms and culture was incomprehensive at
first, but we learned, and we were enchanted. Jose Martí: “Charm is a product of the unexpected.”
11