Missive #15: The French-Cuban Connection

I hadn’t done the following things since living in France as a teenager (and I am thoroughly enjoying every minute of every one of them again!):

1: Doing laundry entirely by hand. Even the washing machine needs to be fed clothes into one tub for washing and then into another tub for spinning (which they call drying) before being hung on the clothesline.

I hated doing laundry in France, because it entailed taking the wet clothes up to the attic to hang out to dry, and then my French mother insisted on ironing my blue jeans. Here in Cuba, I don’t own a pair of jeans, and I am so happy to have my own brick-paved outdoor patio with a double-basin.

I found some old plastic-coated wires and hung them diagonally through the top slats of the louvered aluminum windows. The best part of doing laundry by hand is that I can be as sloppy and as slow and as stupid as I want, and nobody knows or cares, and all my laundry comes out just fine.

So here I am, imitating my French mother, making la soupe pour les chiens -- her homemade dog food, which was constantly simmering on the stove inside a huge pot, into which she would throw anything and everything she didn’t serve to the family or feed to the ducks (such as carrot and potato peels), only in my case, it’s la soupe pour le chat siamois-cubain). And I cannot stop thinking about my own Cuban mother, who actually used to love eating the fish’s eyes. Now it is my darling Semi who gently devours the eyeballs, leaving only the smallest piece of inedible white pit behind.

A few days ago, Alice and I and Marielys bought a large amount of seafood, including three huge red snappers, directly from the fisherman who caught them, in the northern coastal town nearest Remedios. Back at the parent’s house in Placetas, her parents cleaned and cut the fish up into ruedas, round pieces instead of filets, and then put the heads, tails, fins, etc., into a large pot for la comida del gato.

The fish parts are covered with water and brought to boil, then rice is added and simmered until the whole thing thickens, and voilà! La soupe aux chats par excellence. It was then shoveled into a couple of plastic bags, frozen, and brought home to feed my Semi for about another week.

3. Stopping the car to find a place to pee behind a tree in the countryside.

4. Following the truck drivers on the road out in the middle of nowhere to wherever they stop to eat. These places generally have the best food at the best prices.

Cienfuegos is the city where my mother was born. Her father, like many of the Cuban Pearl of the South’s residents, is a French descendant. Alice fell in love with Cienfuegos at first sight and, having already decided that she wanted to take a year off from teaching to learn Spanish, felt that she would love to spend part of that year in her grandmother’s lovely hometown.

I had already been remembering the chicken croquettes from the Havana Yacht Club, and the ones my mother continues to make, and the ones I buy at the nearest kiosco, and, of course, now it occurs to me that croquette is yet another French cuisine word and exquisite cultural item that has been made nearly universal, like the ballet and the bouquet.

I feel like I have come full-circle, finally fusing my memories of Havana and Paris, and my former lives in Cuba and in France.