Havana Salsa Stories And Recipes

Introduction Let me make clear that this book is neither a dance manual nor a Cuban cookbook per se. And if you are looking for new dance steps or an old black bean recipe you won't find them here. What you will discover is a remembrance of the Havana that was and the food we ate before the Castro catastrophe.Havana Salsais a group of connected stories, all absolutely true, at least 98 percent of the time. With some name changes and to the best of my recollection. The remaining 2 percent consists of a pinch of fantasy and a dash of sentimentality. Much like life itself. This book has been rattling in my head since Mrs. Prieto, my first-grade teacher at Ruston Academy in Havana, told me I had either a very vivid imagination or a very remarkable family and that, in either case, I should someday write about it. As time passed things all around me got even more "interesting" and as I retold the stories they seemed harder and harder to believe. But the truth is that my reality was magical in itself; the Havana of the forties and fifties, with its corruption, turbulent politics, delicious decadence, and my eccentric family, is indeed, the stuff of myths. Born in 1939, I grew up in the Cuba of the forties, when magical realism was first being defined. We may not have recognized the concept in our daily lives, but we were living it -- the fusion of the real and the fantastic. A Catholic country famous for its decadence, our Cuba was shaped by opposing perspectives -- one rational, the other supernatural. With the continual social and political upheaval, the endless struggle for a political ideal, and the reality of a revolution, the extraordinary was taking place in our lives every day. The Cuba I knew in pre-Castro days has disappeared, a place in time and space that will never be again. Cuba now is filled with sadness, crumbling buildings, an agriculture in ruins, an economy in shambles. Long gone are the days filled with music and laughter, the closeness of family now obliterated by a diaspora that started in the early sixties and continues to this day. The sense of humor, the very lust for life that defined the Cuban character, has given way to emotional depletion and a life of extraordinary hardship. Cuba has become a third-world country with little available food, power outages, and water stoppages every day. This is not the Cuba I knew. Wanting to pass on the mythical quality of my country and that of those around me, I decided to write down my own Cuban history. At every family gathering, inevitably centered around food, my U.S.-born nephews and nieces ask me to tell them stories of the Cuba I lived in. They know the historical facts as taught in school; they know the politics from reading the papers; they know the traditional food trapped in the fifties' nostalgia of the popular Cuban restaurants in Miami, but the smells, the tastes, the sounds, the soul, the physical feel of the country -- that Cuba -- they only know through my generation's memories. Essentially this book is a collection of those stories about my family, a rather eccentric group who conducted their lives against the extraordinary backdrop of Havana. This is a snapshot of who we were and the way we ate with the people we loved. And since there is no bigger cultural trigger than food, the book is set up as a series of vignettes showcasing the food and recipes I associate with each family memory, beginning with my childhood in the forties through the sensual fifties and then the first eighteen months of the Revolution.Havana Salsatells the history of Havana, my Havana, through the sortilege of its food and the mirror of my family. When my parents met in the late thirties, they were both married to others, but the difficulties they had to overcome to be together only intensified their passion. I was born in 1939, almost a year before they married each other. Cuba wCarballo, Viviana is the author of 'Havana Salsa Stories And Recipes', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743285179 and ISBN 0743285174.