"After setting the knife aside, useless and inoperative, we then took the bread with our hands, stretching and twisting it with fury, pulling it with all our strength, with murderous ferocity, until finally breaking its neck and splitting it apart, […] in that crucial and transcendent moment, we found ourselves gazing intently at the bread: […]: Is this a bread? A bread in itself and for itself? Or a bread in not and for not? Or perhaps it is only its intention, its aspiration, its desire, its ambition in life, its goal, that is, to become a bread?"
Thus, in the 1970s, the brilliant chronicler and humorist Héctor Zumbado "reflected" in the Cuban state press. His famous text about bread, which has been successively updated by generations of comedians drawing on the "bread-related" suffering of generations of Cubans over half a century, remains remarkably relevant.
Such musings might come to mind after watching the video uploaded on social media by the popular artist El Funky (Eliecer Márquez Duany), in which a young man shows a couple of "breads" (which can only be called that name if placed in quotes) that are provided by the Cuban government in state-run shops.
Between the young man who comes with his supply notebook in hand (which is twice the size of the so-called "breads"), the one who is recording him, and another who is participating, they capture a moment of typical Cuban humor, as part of that resilience strategy of those born on the Island to mock their misfortunes in order to keep moving forward without getting too depressed.
Small, wrinkled, flattened, deformed, with an indefinable color leaning towards green; it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the whiteness that bread is identified with anywhere else in the world. The product that the young man shows and then strikes against the floor, and later another bends as if it were a piece of pottery, this abomination, in other words, evidence—more than any discourse—of what the Cuban government believes it can provide to feed its people.
"Calling that bread." "How disgusting!" "...They taste old or like cockroach and they hardly add any grease." "What a shame." "How long, Cubans!?"... The comments from the forum users immediately added salt and yeast to the "succulent" dough of the reel.
If in the past the Cuban government could at least boast “with a bread in their chest,” to use the vernacular of the comedian Pánfilo Epifanio (Luis Silva), that it was providing a small ration of subsidized bread to stores, now that support has disappeared, amid the bottomless crisis the country is facing.
Sometimes it fails. Sometimes it goes three or four days without showing up. Sometimes, the bakers themselves admit, they make it with cassava, sweet potato, pumpkin… whatever invention comes up, except for the mandatory wheat flour.
In recent weeks, with the intensified shortage of fuel, there has been a return to wood-burning ovens, using flour transported on muleback, which has resulted in a significant decline in quality, much worse.
And the other one, the one produced by private businesses and can indeed be called and eaten like bread, due to its astronomical price caused by the high costs they incur to obtain the materials, has become unaffordable for many of those born on the Island.
"Cuban bread competes for Guinness World Records," comments El Funky, a two-time Grammy winner along with the team behind the iconic song "Patria y Vida," to introduce the video "paneril." "It's that we eat this and we transform. Hey, Trump. Hey, Trump, look at this!" one of the young people featured in the brief clip can be heard saying.
What a terrible weapon of mass extermination that "Cuban food" is.
¡Tremble, Delta Force!
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