Cuban Bread

Miami Lakes, Florida
1992

I open the front door of my mother’s house, to find my grandfather. His dyed hair is slicked back with pomade and his gold chain glimmers in the sun. He has a tanned neck and bronzed forearms from years of working outdoors. The scent of warm lard seeps through the paper flute he is holding and manages to cross the threshold before he does. “Howard Johnson,” he says with a smile, not, How are you?

By the time my mother ends her conversation on the telephone that is wired to the kitchen wall, my grandfather has walked home, down the block and around the corner, and I have carved the loaf hollow, wondering how something could melt in my mouth so quickly, a whole loaf reduced to a cavernous crust, missing its insides, which moments ago were clouds of salt, flour and lard that I pulled out and flattened between my fingers like cotton candy.
My mom tears off a handful of the soft warm loaf, spoons sugar into the hollow and drizzles hot espresso straight from the spout, coloring the white crystals and baked dough caramel. This is pan con café y azúcar. This is Sunday morning.

But, soon, my grandfather will trip over his own feet, fail to apply the brakes on his Chrysler, and choke on his dinner. These each sound like better ways to die than enduring four years of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. He will suffer the latter, progressively losing his ability to talk, walk, swallow or write. We will refrain from eating where he can smell the food he can no longer taste with his mouth.

My mother’s house will change quite a bit. Different address. Different husband. Her daughters will move out. Her mother, a widow, will move in.

Now on Sunday mornings, my uncle rings my mother’s doorbell. He drives away before she answers, leaving a box of fried pastries that stick to the butcher paper, and a loaf of Cuban bread balanced precariously on her mailbox.

Gainesville, Florida
2015

There is one bodega in this small college town that holds a cabinet with a built-in food warmer. By eleven a.m. the cabinet is bare. We slept in. We missed out.

At Walmart, where I always feel smaller than an ant and lose my bearings, I push my baby in his stroller and let my five-year-old lead the way. He knows just where it is. It’s not as soft. It’s not as warm. It’s not even spelled correctly. But they have it. Loaves of it. Plentiful is not always good. It is like the unruly pile of unfolded t-shirts, the plastic sandals missing their partners, or the seasonal decorations that collect on the linoleum floors. There, mass-produced and mislabeled, it is. Cubano bread. My son shakes his head. “No saben español,” he says.

I am also underwhelmed, even as we satiate our hunger sitting on a bench by a playground. We are just living in this town temporarily, I think. This isn’t home. Home is to be determined. When my husband finishes graduate school and wherever he accepts a position as professor of history.

He’s still in bed, sleeping off last night’s party, which was frequented by other transients like us, passers-through, hailing from Houston, Atlanta, or Jacksonville, who like black beans, rum, and double-nine dominoes, survived another a long week at the university and wanted to gather where they know they can hear Celia Cruz, Prince, Hozier, and Orishas under the same roof.

Sometimes, I think I’d like to settle here. It’s got nice parks and we are already here, aren’t we? But I’m not really sure. I mean, the bread is bland. It’s missing something. It’s missing real lard.

“Is that where y’all learned English?” A woman asks me, looking at my Santa Fe College lanyard. I stare at her for a moment. Then she smiles and says slowly, “I heard y’all’s Spanish. I’m thinking of taking a few classes there. I don’t know.”

“I teach English there, ma’am,” I respond. She frowns at me, confused. “I fully recommend it. Great college,” I say. Then her brows furrow and she wrings her hands.
We don’t belong here.

La Habana, Cuba
2017

Sliced, left to harden in a woven basket on a long antique table, and waiting by a bowl of papaya and another of hard-boiled eggs, is pan. No need to give it any adjective here. It’s the only kind. We are offered honey or butter. The café is keeping warm in a small ceramic lamp, like a genie is about to pop out. I don’t need to make any wishes. I’m finally visiting the island.

It’s not because Cuba “went free” like some like to say in Miami. What is that even supposed to mean? But before I left, my grandmother wanted me to think that I was betraying my grandfather, who in 1966, boarded a Freedom Flight—a U.S.-chartered plane that carried away refugees—and promised not to return until the Revolution ended. He died waiting, and my grandmother believes I was supposed to have inherited his unfulfilled dream.

“Eres Americana,” my grandmother protested, watching me pack my bags. I tried to make her understand my need to visit Cuba.

“Why should I not see for myself the island where I should have grown up? Is Cuba only a revolution you were against? Cuba was a country before the Revolution and it will continue to be a country after it. I have to learn about it. I have to show it to my children. It belongs to them.”

“No,” she said. “Mira ver lo que dice tu passaporte.”

Anyone can “look” and “see” that it’s navy blue and United Statesian. So am I. But it is less obvious that I am also not from here. I have always known this. My grandmother was one of the first to teach me this.

When I wanted to sleepover a friend’s house, move away to attend college or vote Democrat, my grandmother said those were things for gringas. But now that I want to understand what it really means to be Cuban, go to the actual source of the recipe, she flips the dish over on itself.

My grandmother found her home in Miami, a room with a slanted view. But I did not.
I married a historian of Cuba. He doesn’t tell me what to think. But he asked me once, “If everything in Cuba was so great before the Revolution, then why did so many Cubans think they needed one?” He is, at the core, a writer, like me. We write to figure out the truth about things. He scours archives and conducts interviews. He needs to do this in Cuba. I need to go with him to do what I do. Observe. Listen. Feel. Smell. Taste.

Serving breakfast at the inn, is a kind woman who wants to know if this is our first visit to Cuba. I hope she will not ask why we have not visited before. I calm down when I remember the obvious. Travel bans have restricted it for most of my adult life. Before that, I remember how growing up in Miami where Cubans floated to the US shore on makeshift rafts, taught me to see Cuba as a place that motivated escape, even despite the danger of drowning. I needed to come here to see the faces of people who never dreamt of leaving.

I am afraid of being asked another question: Why did my family leave?

I’ll say they left for religious reasons, even though this is a lie. Religion was illegal under the Revolution but is now allowed as a private practice. It’s so personal as not to warrant criticism. I’ll say I want to learn all I can about Cuba, and that’s the truth.

I pour myself more café and grab another firm slice of pan. It’s thicker than melba toasts, but lighter and more addictive. I have to check myself before I empty the basket. The butter is creamy, and there is real cane sugar in my café. I dip the toast into the syrupy espresso. My cup is porcelain and matches the set in an ornate China cabinet in the shadows. What I like most about this kitchen is that it opens to a wide patio. We are under a roof, but also dining alfresco. It’s a colonial home, probably built for a family that owned a sugar plantation a day’s horse ride away. I’ve read that many homes like this were repatriated, divided up and rented to Cubans. But lately, many Cubans are opening up bed and breakfasts, or paladares, where homecooked meals are monetized. These are private businesses, and the state-run economy is changing. It would help Cubans if more visitors would support these, instead of foreign-owned hotels and cafés that take their profits off shore. The owner, also a costume designer for films, records our passport numbers for his records. His late partner was a textile artist, and the contrast between the original ornate fixtures and his modern woven designs make me want to roam the home, delighted for hours.

Since I did not grow up here, I don’t know what words will help me bond or alienate me but I tell myself that I am not entirely out of place. A genetic test revealed my oldest ancestor was a native of Cubanacán, centuries before Spanish colonization. Thousands of decisions, encounters, coincidences and accidents led to me. And most of these happened here.
I think of my genes and I think of Cuban bread.

The Cubanacan made flatbread with Cassava and placed slices of fish or the meat of birds in between to make sandwiches. The Spanish brought pigs to breed on the island and placed the meat inside slices of a loaf of bread that they baked with nothing but water and flour. While no one can trace the exact birthday of pan Cubano, or the Cuban Sandwich, we can at least figure out how the basic ingredients first came together.

As a child, I learned to enjoy the bread on its own, aimlessly indulging in a single food group. But more likely, those under pressure to return to work will seek protein with their carbs, and so, opt for a sandwich. Some bakers intentionally began baking a firm version of the bread, so that it could form the top and bottom of a sandwich, without having to leave the bread out to harden for a few days. Others, like those in Miami Lakes, bake it soft and then squeeze the sandwich in between the two hot surfaces of a butter-coated press post-production.

Cuban bread didn’t leave the island until the 19th Century, when cigar workers and their families sailed over the Florida Straits on Spanish-owned ships to settle in company towns propped up to support the factories in Key West and Tampa. There, in Southern Florida, they bred the first Cuban Revolution, a battle to win independence from the Spanish Empire, which US-born children learn to call the Spanish-American War. Over the years I’ve learned more about how the consequences of a US-mediated independence from Spain in 1898 would later ferment more unrest in Cuba, and partly foment the rise of another Cuban Revolution in 1959, an uprising against the military dictator, Fulgencio Batista. By then, Cuban bread will be a staple in every diasporic city, like Miami, Ybor City, or even West New York, where my husband would later be born, and mostly consumed by working-class individuals, ordering their Cuban sandwiches from lunch counters. However, in Cuba, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the period of extreme food shortages and general scarcity known as el Periodo Especial, a small morsel of bread was provided daily to help Cubans subsist. Few had meat to fill their bread. Some cut the morsel in half to stretch out the ration. I marvel that this basket was full before I sat down at this table and I go for the last hardened slice of pan.

Fomento, Cuba
2017

El duuuuuuuuro. El duuuuuuuuro.

A network of fighting cocks, more elegantly referred to as gallos finos, call and answer one another during each dark hour of the night. I couldn’t sleep. The cascading waves of cawing and crowing has finally piped down, as the sun comes up over the moist hills of central Cuba, and with it, pregoneros, singing vendors selling door-to-door. I’ve learned from my husband that it’s a tradition that began in Oriente, east from here, along with a form of music called el son and all Cuban revolutions.

El suaaaaaaaave. El suaaaaaaaave.

Those are the options. Hard or soft. My husband is impressed. When he was last in Fomento, and the cousins shared the small ration of bread they were brought in the morning, they did not have the option. He was a kid. He called it pan de hormiga, bread for ants. My sons like grinding the coffee beans that were harvested and roasted by their father’s cousins. The rice and black beans we feasted on last night are also from this land. The café is much stronger here than it is in la Habana. I need it to be.

It’s an active day, exploring the farm. The restless roosters are difficult to catch, but once gathered into your hands, you can feel how they vibrate hot like a car engine. We cut sugar cane and suck the nectar out of the fibrous stalks. My oldest son chases a chicken with a machete and then gives up. His chase does not raise alarm. All know chickens cannot be sliced by machete. They are too fast. But when he attacks a whole branch of bananas, that were not ready to be cut down, I see one cousin wince. They are ruined.

A plump pig runs amok inside an enclosure. Another cousin passes a bottle of rum to my husband and says, that sucker owes you her life, compadre. I understand that my husband declined to feast on the slaughtered pig. I remember watching my grandfather roast a pig every Christmas Eve in his Miami Lakes backyard. I still have nightmares about human babies and chubby pigs being carried on an assembly line toward a meat grinder—the ridiculous reaction of my sheltered suburban subconscious. I smile at him gratefully. He winks and nods at our youngest son, who is smitten with a pile of sleepy newborn puppies.

On our last morning there, our breakfast is pan con lechón. We don’t tell our boys it’s from the same place as the beans, cane or bananas. I want to stay in Fomento longer. We all promise to visit again as soon as we can. I wonder if these cousins, some of them older than people we’ve lost in the United States, will still be alive when we are able to return. We say goodbye on a front porch that has been in the family since this farming town was founded, four generations ago. I will never know this kind of belonging. Neither will my children. Or theirs.

Ybor City, Florida by Lauren Rivera Fernández

Ybor City, Florida
2023

If I worked in a cigar factory, a century and a half ago, I would have been a stripper, in charge of removing the stems from tobacco leaves. My alarm in the morning? The loud whack of the baker’s delivery of Cuban bread, slammed onto the wooden siding of my family’s home. No paper or plastic covering it. Just a nail sticking out by the front door to hold it in place, far above the reach of chickens, dogs or goats. Two nails? Two loaves. A handful of these homes are on display in Ybor City, where my husband, the boys and I peruse, imaging the past.

We walk to a park on the corner of East 8th Avenue and North 13th Street, a small plot of land that belongs to Cuba—and we can enter without showing passports! Paulina and Ruperto Pedroso, an Afro-Cuban couple owned a boarding house here in the 1890s, breaking bread with a particular guest who made it famous.

In 1891, the couple met José Martí, a young lawyer, poet and orator, known as the apostle of Cuban independence, on a visit to Key West. After moving to Ybor City and establishing their boarding house, they invited Martí to stay, honoring his visits by raising the Cuban Flag. It was there that Martí recovered from an assassination attempt in 1892, while Ruperto stood guard outside the home. In health, Paulina and Martí walked arm-in-arm through the town, to project Martí’s vision of equality. One of his most famous speeches delivered at the nearby Liceo Cubano, a cigar factory-turned-Social club, is titled “Con todos y para todos,” or with all and for all. I wonder if he wrote it here, his lamp burning oil late into the night. A stone archway over an iron gate bears the name “Paque Amigos de José Martí.” I like that the name pays tribute to the couple who saved this important man’s life. And as I stand here with my family, we are competing with the many festive chickens and roosters pecking and darting about.

Any street, alley or park in Ybor City, it is populated by these feathered creatures. They are no longer raised for food, as they were when the original Cuban workers who settled here brought them on ships. Instead, they have been protected and proliferating for quite some time, and a misfit microsancuary takes them in when injured. Park Rangers who give free tours instruct visitors not to feed them, lest they interrupt their habitual diet. Cuban poultry in Paradise, I think, as we walk to the next landmark, la Union Maceo-Martí.

Ruperto Pedroso was an original founder of la Union Maceo-Martí in 1904, a mutual aid society that welcomed Afro-Cuban members, offering medical care and community in the time of Jim Crow. A vibrant mural runs along the side of the building. You would be able to see Martí’s quintessential broad pale forehead and the noble likeness of General Antonio Maceo, who fought for the abolition of slavery and Cuban Independence. But you can only appreciate it in photographs, now that a Goliathan hotel has erected a wall that covers it.
“Who allowed that?” I ask my husband.

“You should be asking what they did to the original building,” he says. He can only shake his head in disapproval. Later, I will look up articles about it on the Tampa Bay Times website.

The original building for La Sociedad La Union Maceo-Martí was like the other stately and ornate mutual aid society buildings which were for whites only. We had seen them earlier that day. They still stand tall and imposing, like the Italian villas in James Bond movies. But in the 1960s, urban renewal funding and a need for low income housing for longshoreman somehow justified taking the only mutual aid society for people of color under eminent domain. It’s gone.

You’d almost think this town has been kinder to the Cuban chickens than to its Afro-Cuban community.

The military barracks-style apartments that were erected there have now been canceled as well. The new plans for GasWorx, a large complex of affordable housing and commercial space with infrastructure for public transit, and not cars, has just been approved by the local zoning commission, who have lauded the project as historically minded. It will connect the city in pedestrian-friendly ways, potentially bringing back the families that have not been able to live near downtown Tampa for a few generations. I wonder if this is really what it sounds like, a sort of symbolic de-gentrification? If so, they’d need to rebuild La Union Maceo-Martí, and actually offer medical care, tennis lessons, theater performances and social gatherings, like they used to. I want to join.

For lunch, we all walk to a restaurant built like the cafés we saw in la Habana Vieja, with high ceilings, stained glass bóvedas above the windows and green painted tiles along the ample bar. “Some claim this place is the oldest to serve the Cuban Sandwich in the US,” my husband says, and shrugs.

The bread they serve here is delivered fresh each morning by La Segunda Bakery, founded in 1915, by a Spanish-Italian conscript sent to Cuba, who deserted the Spanish army during the island’s struggle for independence, and sailed here, to become a baker. I’m glad he deserted.

I sink my teeth into the sandwich. It’s savory and sweet. The fat from the layers of meat, melted Swiss cheese, tart mustard, and briny sliced sweet pickles all blend between two sides of a Cuban loaf. My husband, my oldest son and I chew, savor and swallow. We nod casually, underplaying our pleasure.

The youngest member of the family is at the table, too, and we have recently discovered his gluten intolerance. My poor little one can’t taste this bread, for very different reasons from those that prevented my grandfather from doing so. To make him feel fortunate, despite having to abstain, we all dig our forks into his plate of rice, black beans and roast pork. We say we wish we would have ordered this instead. And after walking Ybor City under the summer sun all morning we are all ready to devour our late lunch in silence.

I wonder what makes this version of Cuban bread, pan Cubano? It’s made with enriched flour, unlike it is in Cuba. It’s firm enough to stick on a nail hanging off the wall of a wooded house, unlike any floppy counterpart in Miami Lakes. It tastes buttery, not infused with lard, like the bread my grandfather used to bring me on Sunday mornings.

What makes any version of bread pan Cubano? It is kneaded with hands that feel connected to the island, and prepared for Cubans who live on or off of it. It has been a staple in times of scarcity and a delicacy that can attract a tourist. Pan Cubano can comfort migrants or their descendants who learn to love it. Like our bread, we have become a scattered people, risen and baked in different environments. So maybe it should be as varied as we are.

When we finish our sandwiches, we feel so full, we must order two cafecitos and let the boys each have a sip. My gluttonous and meandering exploration of Cuban bread in five different cities has only led me to more questions than answers. Perhaps learning history is the way that I seek a sense of belonging, like growing roots. Since I lack the kind that can tether me to land like a deed, a battle or the act of sowing crops, I search for my identity in these stories, trying to fill in what my family erased when they uprooted.