Unlimited ice cream for communists

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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
Page 1: Unlimited Ice Cream for Communists
Page 5 and 6: Gaby and Laura were our perfect amb
Page 7: known Gaby for years, and to finall
Page 11 and 12: of penguins wandering the white con
Page 13 and 14: “Yes, I know we had nine scoops,

Unlimited ice cream for communists

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?