Food in Cuba is rather…limited. In all the ways. In one hand there’s rationing system so things like rice, eggs, oil, beans are provided and may be bought for “libreta” which is a little book where it’s written how much of each product you have a right to buy. Since Cuba almost don’t import anything you can only get things that grow or are produced here.
The base of Cuban diet is rice and beans. You’ll see it on a Cuban table every single day. You buy it for pounds, it does not come closed in plastic bags as we know it so the first task before cook it is to separate the grains to make sure you cook only the good ones. If you have a big family it make take ages 😉
Cooking in Cuba is a challenge. Nobody has an oven and usually there’s only one stove per kitchen. Everybody uses rice cooker and pressure cooker and they look at me as I was an alien when I say I’m almost 30 and have never used one of these before. Because how can you even thinking of cooking without a rice cooker…” You don’t eat rice everyday?! So what do you eat?! ”

Cuba is an Tropical Island so it seems that the diet should be healthy and full of fruits and veggies. Nothing like that. There are a lot of fruits like bananas, mango, papaya, pineapple, guayaba, avocado and much more (I haven’t really learned all the names yet 😉 ) but not many Cubans actually eat them. The prices of the fresh product does not help. Thant’s true. It’s expensive to be veggie lover here.
So what do the Cubans eat beside of rice and benas? A lot of cooked and fried meat. Fried platains or root vegetable. Fried everything! And pizzas…yes. There are street stands with pizzas for 10 Cuban Peso so the lines are big. I’m not suprised that Cubans are getting bigger and bigger .
To help the diet, Cubans are big fans of soft drinks. They drink it alone, with ron or with meals. I wonder how long my body will stand this new way of eating…
I assume you can’t bring in anything else…. like fruit leathers or dried fruits and just reconstitute them?
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