THINGS BECAME SCARCE: FOOD AVAILABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY IN SANTIAGO de CUBA THEN AND NOW

T H I N G S B E CA M E S CA R C E : F O O D AVA I L A B I L I T Y AN D ACCE SS I B I LITY I N SANTIAGO DE CU BA TH E N AN D NOW Hanna Garth University of California–Los Angeles Cuba has had a nationalized food rationing system since 1962, and has been lauded for exemplary food security innovations in the face of national financial hardship. Decreases in food and agricultural related importations after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 limited the amount of food provided in the monthly rations, forcing individuals to acquire increasing amounts of their food through other means. This article reveals the complexities Cubans face when attempting to access foods in Santiago de Cuba. This project examines how Cubans experience their food system, their struggles to maintain food traditions despite the low availability of ingredients, and how people use and relate to Cuba’s food provisioning system. In this article two memories of past periods of abundance are juxtaposed to show the different ways in which individuals interpret food security. The analysis of semistructured interviews, community mapping, and participant-observation reveal the ways in which residents of Santiago de Cuba orient to their present situation through memories of past periods when foods were more available and more easily accessible. Keywords: Cuba, food security, culinary traditions, everyday practices, state power Global food security has become an increasing concern across the world. The World Food Program (WFP) states that rates of hunger in Cuba are “extremely low” (WFP 2009). Cuba has had a nationalized food rationing system since 1962, and has been lauded for exemplary food security innovations in the face of national financial hardship (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2009). This project examines the present day Cuban food system and how Cubans living in Santiago de Cuba experience the process of food acquisition. This article highlights individual struggles to acquire food products in the face of low availability and decreased accessibility compared to previous time periods in Cuba. In many ways this work revisits Benjamin and colleagues’ mission to “get beyond polemics and investigate firsthand the food realities in Cuba today,” over 20 years later and on a much smaller scale (Benjamin et al. 1984:302). There are many ways to measure food security, access to food, and hunger. This project focuses on individual accounts of food access and acquisition. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has noted the difficulty in measuring and charac- terizing food access (Ver Ploeg et al. 2009) given many levels of decision making such as how much time to allocate to food acquisition and other food related activity, choosing NAPA BULLETIN 32, pp. 178–192. ISSN: 1556-4789.  C 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. DOI:10.1111/j.1556-4797.2009.01034.x 178 napa Bulletin 32/Things Became Scarce where and how food is acquired, and choosing what to eat. This research project sug- gests that the process of food acquisition is a complicated and time-consuming task for Santiago households. To understand food acquisition as a complex, multilayered process this project explores subjects’ perceptions of food accessibility and availability as well as the difficulties of navigating the food system in Santiago de Cuba. This work focuses on Cuba’s second largest city, Santiago, which is located in the southeastern part of the island. Santiago’s tropical climate provides ideal growing condi- tions for many crops, including sugar, tobacco, coffee, and fruit. In spite of the fact that Santiago has a population of about 500,000 people, Santiagueros often self-identify as guajiros or peasants. Santiago is known for its vibrant Afro-Cuban culture; many Santia- gueros are proud to maintain what they perceive to be African traditions not only through music, dance, and ritual forms but also through culinary practices. Santiago provides an urban setting through which to view urban food cultivation and food acquisition in a very distinct cultural and social context compared to Havana. Havana is often used as a point of comparison not only because it is where the majority of ethnographic work has taken place but also because Santiagueros usually draw on Havana as a comparison to their own situations. Cuba’s current food system was borne of a complex history of strained economic periods and the need to innovate solutions in the face of deficient international trade relationships (Premat 1998; Stricker 2007). At the inception of Cuba’s food rationing system, Fidel Castro noted that a supply and demand price policy “would have been nothing short of ruthless sacrifice on the part of the poor population with the lowest income,” and according to Benjamin et al., “such a policy was accepted for luxury and nonessential goods but never for the necessities” (1984:15). Because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, beginning in the late 1980s Cuba suffered a period of economic hardship known as the “Special Period in Time of Peace” (Alvarez 2004; Powell 2008). During this period Cubans barely maintained access to basic foods and luxury and nonessential goods were nearly impossible to find. The collapse of the Soviet Union was extremely devastating for Cuba not only because of their heavy reliance on the Soviet Union as a trade partner but also because the Soviets subsidized the price that Cuba paid for petroleum and supplied free weapons to Cuba. The Soviets also provided low interest loans to cover several Cuban development projects (Dominguez 2005:12). During the period of Soviet financial and material aid, there was an abundance of cheap imported food products and other goods that were accessible even to poor Cubans. The Special Period brought an end to these cheap imports and subsequent food scarcity. Although the end of the Special Period is widely debated, many Santiagueros argue that Cuba is still immersed in the Special Period. Mesa-Lago argues that among decreasing wages and purchasing power, and exceedingly high prices for essential goods and in agricultural free markets, the reduction in food rations from one month’s supply to only about 10 days’ supply, contributed to today’s decline in the Cuban standard of living (2005). Despite the fact that Cuba’s health and social indicators remained noteworthy in the 1990s, “caloric intake fell by 27% between 1990 and 1996” (Dominguez 2005:14). During these years food products became scarce and those that did exist were difficult for average napa Bulletin 32/Things Became Scarce 179 Cubans to access because of their increased prices. Additionally school cafeterias, day care centers, and government job sites provided fewer and lower-quality foods than they had before (Messina 2004). These scarcities of the early 1990s coupled with the creation of the Convertible Unit of Currency (CUC), which I discuss below, led to an increasing lower class in Cuba in the 1990s where “12 percent of urban Cubans earned less than 100 pesos per month (less than $5 per month at the prevailing exchange rate), had no access to dollars, grew no food and received no food subsidies” (Dominguez 2005:15). In 1993, the government began to allow Cubans to legally use foreign currency; previously the possession of hard currency was a punishable crime. Cuba operated on a dual U.S. dollar–Cuban peso economy until 2004 when dollars ceased to be accepted and the Convertible Cuban Peso (CUC or Chavitos) came into circulation. At the time of my research the CUC was equivalent to one dollar and eight cents. However, Cubans do not get paid in CUC; Cuba’s second currency, the Cuban national peso is the currency that most Cubans are paid in. There are 25 national pesos per CUC. Whereas there used to be many stores that accepted the national peso, these stores are increasingly converting to CUC, thus forcing Cubans to convert their Cuban national pesos into CUC to make their purchases (Centero et al. 1997; De La Fuente and Glasco 1997; Phillips 2009). Many find the dual currency system to be exhausting and discriminatory in that some see it as creating a two-tiered society—one with access to CUC and one with the national peso. This project was initially conceived of as follow up research on the literature on the wide spread usage of community gardens in Cuba published in the 1990s; however, I quickly found that compared to other forms of food procurement these gardens are not as central in the everyday lives of people in Santiago de Cuba today as they were reported in the literature. I shifted my research to focus more broadly on the daily processes of food acquisition in addition to the uses of community gardens in Santiago. I found that households generally acquire foods in five basic ways: the government food rations, gifts and trades, black market purchases, peso purchases, and convertible currency (CUC) purchases. In this article I juxtapose two different memories of food abundance to show the vary- ing ways in which individuals conceptualize food accessibility. The memories articulated in this work are part of the way that Santigueros relate past practices to the current shifts in food accessibility (Garro 2000b). For Santiagueros, the making of a meal is deeply tied with remembered histories of their Spanish, African, Indian, and Haitian ancestors (Sahlins 1990:95). The memories recounted here may facilitate an understanding of the past that helps Santiagueros comprehend their lives in the present and help them to cope with the difficult circumstances that they face today (Bruner 1990:340). Many Santiagueros express that the transition to state control over food production caused a great shift in the everyday eating of a typical Cuban household, yet when asked what typical Cuban meals consisted of before the 1959 revolution most respond that the standard foods—rice, black beans, pork, and tubers—has in fact not changed. It is true, however, that for many Santiagueros the acquisition of these essential ingredients has become increasingly difficult. Food acquisition is a daily, interdependent activity that forces cooperation among individual community members. My research resonates with 180 napa Bulletin 32/Things Became Scarce P. Sean Brotherton’s work on Cuba’s health care system. Brotherton’s work theorizes about a relatively recent shift in individual Cubans’ orientation to the state public health and medical system; as macroeconomic shifts place strain on the system individual Cubans must work harder to make the system work for themselves (Brotherton 2005:178). The frustration that participants express with the Cuban food system shows, as Brotherton has demonstrated with respect to Cuba’s health care system, how hard Cubans must struggle on a daily basis to make the system work (Brotherton 2005). In the following sections, after explaining the general ways in which Santiagueros acquire food, ethnographic data is provided to show Santiagueros’ perceptions of the difficulties of the daily chore of acquiring food in present day Santiago de Cuba. I then present two interlocutors’ very different memories of periods in Santiago’s history where food products were more widely available and more easily accessed by the local population. These memories of what are perceived to have been better days are one way that Santiagueros use the past to make sense of the present (Bruner 1990:340; Garro 2000a:339; Pilcher 1998:64; Prager 1998:312). Through the juxtaposition of present day struggles with food acquisition and remembered times of a perceived lack of struggle in food acquisition this article illuminates the struggle of individual Santiagueros to make the Cuban food system work. M ETH OD OLOGY This research is based on 10 weeks of fieldwork in Santiago de Cuba during the summer of 2008. Using participant-observation, I studied the work carried out for and discourse around the daily acquisition of food for households in various parts of the city. In addition to direct observation, informal, semistructured interviews were conducted across a diverse section of Santiago residents. Through these informal conversations I gained a deeper understanding of local food folklore and symbolic interpretations, in addition to ascertaining the level of local concern over food matters. I interviewed 25 people, some of whom I interviewed multiple times. Most of the interviews were audio recorded when participants consented, and written notes were taken during the conversations. I conducted all of the research in Spanish and transcribed selected interviews myself. Transcripts were analyzed for themes and related quotations; themes were determined based on issues that subjects consistently raised in the interviews. A community mapping exercise was used to identify how participants spatially locate food sources (markets, ration stations, gardens, farms, etc.) in relation to subjects’ homes and other important establishments (markets, schools, clinics, transportation routes). This exercise also illuminated the difficulties faced, the time spent, and the amount of work my interlocutors viewed as necessary to access food. I also acted as a participant- observer in homes and kitchens. Through this context, I observed what foods were served, how they were prepared, as well as discourses surrounding these foods and their access as the meals were being consumed. This was also a way to measure which foods are most commonly consumed in the home. napa Bulletin 32/Things Became Scarce 181 R E S U LT S In the sections that follow I first describe the primary ways in which Santiagueros acquire food: government food rations, peso purchases, CUC purchases, black market purchases, and gifts and trades. I then expand on the results of the community mapping exercise to highlight the difficulties for many Santiagueros in planning and carrying out food acquisition. This example illustrates the amount of effort involved in these processes of food acquisition. Following this outlining of the process of food acquisition I juxtapose two contrasting views of food scarcity to show different local interpretations of what it means to have adequate access to food. U R BAN FOOD ACQU I S ITION In this section, I lay out the basic forms of food acquisition for most of my interlocu- tors and their evaluation of the affordability, availability, and quality of each form of procurement to show their advantages and disadvantages (see Table 1). Government Rations The most common way in which food is acquired is through Cuba’s national food rationing system. Since 1962, the Cuban government has centrally collected and dis- tributed food throughout the country; complaints about Cuba’s food rationing system have persisted since its inception. Every Cuban is eligible for a ration card, with which they can purchase basic food items. The ration prices are very heavily subsidized. The monthly ration includes five eggs, five pounds refined sugar, five pounds raw sugar, five pounds white rice, five pounds of beans, 0.4 pints cooking oil, a loaf of bread per day, and 200g–500g pork or ground beef mixed with soy.1 All of these items cost about 25 national pesos a month, or about one dollar—the ration is essential for making ends meet in most Santiago households. Still, complaints about insufficient food products in the monthly ration are widespread in Cuba (Gjelten 2008:180). During summer of 2008, I quickly found that one of the foremost concerns of many Santiagueros is supplementing their monthly food ration with food items that they view as essential to maintain their ideal Cuban cuisine, in particular: pork, beef, additional rice, black beans, red beans and chick peas, particular spices, eggs, milk, and probably TA B L E 1 . Advantages and Disadvantages of Basic Forms of Food Procurement in Santiago Rations CUC Stores Peso Markets Black Market Gifts and Trades Affordable + − + +/− + High Quality − + − +/− +/− Available − − − − − 182 napa Bulletin 32/Things Became Scarce most importantly, cooking oil. Although fresh produce is something that many desire, these other items usually take precedence over the fresh fruits and vegetables. The government rations are extremely inexpensive, extremely convenient to access given that there is a ration station on nearly every other block, but the supply is often inconsistent in terms of what is available and the quality of the foods. Additionally, the food in the ration is not sufficient for caloric and micronutrient needs. National Peso Markets There many ways to make food purchases with the Cuban national peso. In Santiago there are five large markets that sell goods only in the national peso. Many of the people that I interviewed noted that these markets are very expensive for them, so much so that they try to only shop at these markets when absolutely necessary, that is once they have consumed everything provided by the ration and any foods they can acquire in cheaper ways. Although these markets often have irregular and inconsistent goods, these are often the only places where certain types of food items are available such as lettuce, tomatoes, and other fruits and vegetables that easily perish or are not conducive to street vendors. Those with more resources use these markets more, but complain of their limited and irregular supply.2 The prices at these markets vary greatly. During the summer of 2008 I calculated the average prices of some foods: okra, five pesos per piece ($0.23); small cucumbers, three pesos ($0.14); small slices of squash, one peso ($0.05); malanga, nine pesos per pound ($0.41); yucca, 2.50 per pound ($0.11); small plantains, 7.50 per pound ($0.34); and tomatoes, four pesos per pound ($0.18). Some of these items are also available through street vendors, however because of the small quantity they are able to carry they often run out of popular items. In addition to peso markets, street vendors, whether or not they have a permit to legally sell food, accept pesos for their goods. Many black market purchases are made in pesos, although illicit vendors increasingly demand CUC for their products. Food sales between friends and family normally use the national peso. CUC Purchases Currently, CUC purchases are the only way to acquire many of the products Cubans consider necessary, including additional cooking oil, imported spices, and bouillon cubes, and personal hygiene products such as deodorant. Items in the CUC market are priced similarly to U.S. prices: a can of soda is 75 cents, a bar of soap one CUC, a liter of cooking oil one CUC and ten cents, or 16oz of pasta for two CUC.3 Most of the Santiagueros that I interviewed were able to make very few CUC purchases each month. Many essential items that used to sold in pesos are increasingly only available in CUC; however, individual access to CUC has not increased. Many cited soap and deodorant as their most important monthly CUC purchases and very few people mentioned purchasing the food items available in the CUC stores. napa Bulletin 32/Things Became Scarce 183 Black Market Purchases Figures on black market activity are nearly impossible to come by (Benjamin et al. 1984; Brotherton 2005; Centero et al. 1997; Phillips 2009); I was lucky to acquire some ethnographic data on the black market. Although I cannot draw generalizable conclusions about this data, information of this kind is essential for understanding food security. The category of black market purchases includes not only situations where the possession, consumption, or sale of the product is illegal but also where the manner in which the product is acquired is illegal. Frozen, imported lobster, shrimp and other seafood, often originally destined for hotels and resorts, are also traded on the black market. These foods along with myriad other items, from industrial sized cans of vegetables or capers, to U.S. cigarettes and foreign beer, are all goods stolen from the hospitality industry and constitute a great proportion of the black market goods in Cuba. Additionally, tourists and relatives who are living abroad provide a category of goods bought and sold black market, some of which are legal to possess, canned or freeze dried foods, while others are not, such as certain appliances (see Figure 1). Black market goods sold directly from farmland are also quite common in Santiago. Legally a certain proportion crops harvested are to be sold to the government, but many farmers hoard parts of their harvests to sell directly to the public. Farm fresh eggs and freshly ground coffee are among the many direct from the farm specialties commonly sold in Santiago’s streets. These goods are usually sold clandestinely through social networks. FIGURE 1. Black market exchange. 184 napa Bulletin 32/Things Became Scarce However, those households that post a sign on the door or window advertising their goods must have a permit to do so and thus are selling goods legally. Black market beef was probably the most sought after and most important black mar- ket food product at the time of this research. Although beef is unavailable to the general public, except on rare occasions, Cubans with certain diseases, including HIV/AIDS, diabetes, and kidney disorders receive beef in their rations. Based on my informal con- versations with a local black market beef trader in Santiago, I suspect that some Cubans are able to get beef by purchasing from or trading with those who have the special diet ration. Informal Trades, Self-Production, and Gifts Informal trading and gifts are another essential way in which Santiagueros acquire food. The general scarcity of goods and the extreme irregularity of product availability in Santiago means the hoarding and trading within social networks are essential to overcoming household hardships during times of scarcity. Those with more resources buy products in bulk when they are available in the stores and markets; later they sell or trade these items to friends, family, and extended social networks. Reliance on a network of socios, that is, friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, and godparents, is absolutely necessary to keep from going hungry in Santiago. Food can also be acquired through pregoneros, who, known for their pregones, or jingles, navigate Santiago streets from sunup to sundown singing songs of the quality of their goods. Some street vendors sell and acquire their goods legally; others do not. Although pregoneros are quite convenient given that they come to your home, their prices are marked up and their goods irregular and inconsistent. This description of the various ways in which Santiagueros acquire food for household consumption illuminates the complexities entailed and the difficulty of navigating the task of food acquisition. This description is necessary to show that, although basic foods are widely available, there are varying degrees of individual accessibility. In the following section, I present some ethnographic data regarding local notions of scarcity in Santiago. The following articulations of food scarcity and abundance show how the concepts of access and availability discussed above relate to individuals’ differing ideas about what food security means. T H E W O R K O F F O O D A C Q U I S I T I O N : R E S U LT S O F C O M M U N I T Y MAPPING EXERCISE My research indicates that although basic foods are widely available to Santiagueros, individual community members must put forth a great deal of effort and spend a lot of time on food acquisition. The time and energy of individual efforts to make the system work for themselves is often not taken into account when conceptualizing food security. One afternoon during my fieldwork, Mickey hurriedly came by to get me: “Let’s go, napa Bulletin 32/Things Became Scarce 185 Hanna.” When I asked where we were going, Mickey explained: “we are going to the train station. The train from Guantanamo just arrived; I got a big box of food from my friends in Guantanamo on the train.” My puzzled look led Mickey to further explain: Certain kinds of foods are always cheaper in Guantanamo, like malanga, sweet potatoes, potatoes, some fruits, so we send money to our friends there and they can put a box of food on the train for us for free. It’s like, for example, when you go to the state market here and they only have the things that are in the ration, nothing else, no malanga, no cabbage, no garlic, so you have to run all over town looking for it and you are always looking for the cheap price but you don’t want to risk not buying something and then not finding it somewhere else. It’s not easy. There is no solution. But here [with shipping food from Guantanamo] we have a solution. Here Mickey describes his solution to the common situation of “having to run all over town looking” for food. Although Mickey’s solution of having food sent to him via train from another province is atypical, if not extreme, the frustration of food acquisition and the feeling that “there is no solution” is very common among Santiagueros. The following ethnographic example illuminates a typical amount of effort individuals must put forth to acquire food in Santiago. Here, I used participatory mapping exercise to attempt to understand individual efforts to acquire foods, including travel time and distance as well as the number of locations from which people acquired food. Community mapping exercises have been widely used in food security research (Coveney and O’Dwyer 2009; Hyman et al. 2005; Sharkey 2009). About half of the people whom I asked to participate in my mapping exercise agreed to participate and some would only orient to the space verbally and through gesture.4 They explained to me that the market they used was right up the road, or at the edge of town, often pointing in the direction of the location of reference. My questions regarding how long travel takes were met with some difficulty; travel time varies greatly depending on the mode of transportation. Those who drew or used the map that I purchased to point out their route often had to think for quite a while about where certain points were located. One interlocutor, Alex, explained to me that he felt it was not very effective to use this mapping exercise as a way of gauging the distance that people must travel to acquire food. He felt that a better method would be to ask people what forms of transportation they use, where they go to wait for them, how much they cost and how long they take. I agreed that this would be a wonderful way to garner a deeper understanding of the amount of effort that went in to food shopping and asked him to explain this process for his own process of food acquisition. He explained that in his case to get to the cheapest market located out the outskirts of town he first walked from his house to the other side of the city center. This walk took him about 30 minutes. He then waited for a horse drawn carriage to take him to the edge of town. This was his transportation of choice because it is very cheap, only 0.20 pesos, or just under $0.01. Unfortunately, he often had to wait for 45 minutes to one hour before catching a carriage. The length of time on the carriage varies depending on the number of passengers that get on and off. He 186 napa Bulletin 32/Things Became Scarce explained to me that he could probably walk out to the market but the energy he would “lose” from the walking and sweating in the heat would cost him more in the food he would have to eat and the water he would drink. This ethnographic articulation of food accessibility illuminates the intricacies of food access, and is essential to understanding local concepts of scarcity and abundance. This data demonstrates that considerable time, energy, and financial resources have to be invested in the procurement of food for a typical Santiago household. Additionally, this data shows that we cannot necessarily assume that the proximity of households to food vendors is the distance that individuals will travel to acquire food; other factors about individual choices informing food purchases must be taken into account. F OOD S CAR CITY: AB U N DAN CE F OR S OM E VE R S U S J U ST E N O U G H F O R E V E RYO N E When I asked Juan, a Santiguero in his late 50s who grew up in an upper class Cuban home prior to the 1959 revolution, to describe a typical meal from his childhood, he replied: People almost always eat rice and beans, in other words typical Cuban food: fried plantains, tostones, meat, salad, etc. Children always had a glass of milk. Now they say [milk] is not good for digestion. [Milk] has another way; the lactose takes a different amount of time to digest than other food. Before we always had a glass of milk . . . it was easy to get. The [milkman] brought it to your house, left it in front of your door and there was never a problem with people taking it. The milkman came every day. Kids drank milk four times a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner and before bed. I commented that even by today’s standards that is a lot of milk. Juan continued: Before kids were fat, if you see photos of kids in school before [the revolution] you will see fat kids—uh in private school. I’m referring to private school, because other kids didn’t have these possibilities. Still, in general kids were well nourished. Before [the revolution] you could either go home to eat lunch or your parents gave you money to buy whatever was there—a sandwich, a soda—whatever there was that day. I asked Juan to tell me about the changes that happened after the revolution and he lamented, “Things became scarce.” When he elaborated on the scarcity he recounted that starting in 1959 or 1960, for example, “Corn flakes, a cereal just for kids was not too expensive before but suddenly it was off the shelves and has not come back since.” In addition to U.S.-made cereals such as Corn Flakes, when asked about what changes occurred with respect to food after the revolution my interlocutors listed the following foods as essential to prerevolutionary Cuban cuisine and now scarce: Beef of any sort, “real” (not powdered or canned) dairy products, lettuce, capers, olives, chicken, turkey, duck, lobster, crab, calamari, and shrimp among others. However, those who longed for these food items tended to come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds prior to the napa Bulletin 32/Things Became Scarce 187 1959 revolution. I found that Santiagueros from poorer backgrounds reminisced about a period in the early 1980s when luxury items were scarce, but in their memories basic needs were taken care of for all. One night after sharing a pork leg dinner at his house Rafael began to recall a time when things were simpler . . . young people were happy with simple shoes for 20 pesos and didn’t care about the American style 20 CUC shoes like the youth today. Because people didn’t chase after fancy things everyone was able to have something. Everyone had what they needed; things were equal. Everyone had the same food and it was cheap. When I asked him how all of this was possible, Rafael replied: “Because of the Soviet Union. Those were the best years of the revolution, the 1980s. In the 1980s here no one lacked anything.” DISCUSSION In the ethnographic examples presented above, Juan reminisces about a period during his childhood before scarcity was an issue that his family faced. Juan is remembering a time before the 1959 Cuban revolution, a time before food and agriculture was completely controlled by the state. Prompted only by my question about the typical meals of his childhood Juan fixates on the abundance of milk that was available during his childhood and he later adds that Corn Flakes were once available and accessible for his family. Fresh cow’s milk is still to this day intensely sought after; the Cuban government regulation of all beef products continues to limit people’s access to milk products. I suspect that because of the milk scarcity at the time of our interview, Juan’s memories of his milk-filled childhood were more salient than had there not been a milk scarcity at the time. That is to say, individual concepts of which food items are necessary and desired may vary with food scarcity and abundance. Juan is aware that “others did not have [the] possibilities” to access the same luxury goods as his family did. He notes that he is referring to “private school,” which is along with Corn Flakes another luxury that no longer exists in postrevolutionary Cuba. Juan reflected that after the revolution “things became scarce.” Although he does not explicitly state it, in his mentioning of private school he implies an awareness of the fact that, at the same time certain things became scarce for his family, other things became available and accessible to other poorer families in Santiago and throughout Cuba. Rafael also reflects on a period of his life during which food products and consumer goods in general were much more abundant than what he experiences today. Rafael how- ever reflects on a period after the 1959 revolution during which there was an abundance of goods available at low enough prices that they were accessible to almost all Cubans. Other interlocutors also reminisced about the availability of imported goods from the Soviet Union, China, and other parts of the world during the 1980s. Rafael’s family comes from a poor socioeconomic background, which may contribute to his reflection 188 napa Bulletin 32/Things Became Scarce on the period during the 1980s as the best years of the revolution. For his family, this was a period when things were most widely accessible to them. Rafael also stresses the equality of accessibility of goods during this time: “Everyone had the same food and it was cheap.” The distinct viewpoints of Juan and Rafael raise questions about the role of the distribution of resources and the type and quality of those resources. These two points of view raise questions about the relationship between food security and “desire fulfillment” (Sen 1985). Fidel Castro’s sentiment that a supply and demand price policy “would have been nothing short of ruthless sacrifice on the part of the poor population with the lowest income,” is reflected in Rafael’s concept of food security; everyone is able to access what they need, but some end up sacrificing the ability to access luxury goods. Both the narrative of Juan and that of Rafael reflect on historical periods in which things were better than they are today. Remembering or “misremembering” the past as utopia may be a part of the ways in which Santiagueros make sense of the difficulties of food acquisition today. As shown through Alex’s reflections on the work involved in food acquisition today the process is exceedingly difficult, expensive, and inconvenient at least for some Santiagueros. In reflecting on Alex’s narrative, I was fascinated by his quick calculation of his own energy expenditure versus the monetary costs of transportation. Alex’s focus on the monetary and nonmonetary costs of food acquisition are also illustrative of P. Sean Brotherton’s focus on the difficulties face by individual Cubans in the day-to-day work they must undertake to make the system work (Brotherton 2005:178). As food items have become less available and more difficult to access, as shown through the memories of Juan and Rafael, individuals must expend increased physical and emotional efforts to acquire food. Although relative to other countries with similar aggregate level data, such as GDP, Santiagueros have “extremely low” rates of hunger and food insecurity. Santiago households and individuals must devote a great deal of time and energy to food procurement. CONCLUSIONS In Cuba the national food rationing system guarantees all citizens access to mini- mum basic nutritional needs. These guaranteed basic needs also come with what some Santiagueros like Juan and Rafael perceive as a lack of variety or a lack of choice. The difficulties of acquiring food products legally may contribute to the expansion of black market food activity. Economic and political changes in Cuba have placed strain on the food distribution system; this in turn has necessitated increased efforts on the part of Cuban individuals to make the system work for themselves. In considering Cuba’s food distribution system as an example to be generalized and applied in other settings, it is essential to consider the fact that Cuba’s food system is inex- tricably tied with many other systems at play in Cuba’s socialist government infrastructure such as the free education and medical care provided to citizens. Additionally, country solutions to food scarcity must always take into account trade and other partnerships of napa Bulletin 32/Things Became Scarce 189 that country with the rest of the world. Cuba’s limited trade possibilities force the Cuban government to innovate solutions to food scarcity when other means are unavailable. As availability and access to food shifts, coupled with the dollarization of the Cuban economy, individuals must devote increasing amounts of time and energy to acquire food and remain within the designation of “extremely low” levels of hunger. The dialectic of the two memories of past periods of food availability in Santiago presented here still leaves many questions regarding food security: How much is enough? Can everyone have what she or he wants? Do some need to sacrifice things they want so everyone can have what they need? Who determines what is necessary? What types of social needs must be accounted for with respect to nourishment? Understanding the intricate workings of Cuba’s food system at the level of individual and households in their daily lives provides insight into the complex linkages between Cuba’s food system and other aspects of Cuban life. Additionally, the ethnographic ex- amples presented here show the ways in which the same system can affect individuals in different ways. These Santiagueros present differing notions of needs and desires and how these needs and desires have shifted throughout time. Understanding local con- ceptualizations of need may be essential when considering solutions to food scarcity. By showing how individuals conceptualize food security and their ways of navigating the food system, this work shows the importance of ethnographic research in under- standing how individuals use and experience food systems as a part of food security research. NOTE S Acknowledgments. I would like to acknowledge my friends in Santiago who have made this project by sharing their stories with me, as well as Carole Browner, Linda Garro, Jason Throop, Akhil Gupta, Robin Derby, Paul Ryer, Jennifer Guzman, Ellen Sharp, Katja Antoine, and Christel Miller. I would also like to thank my editor David Himmelgreen and an anonymous reviewer for their comments, which greatly improved this article. This project was funded in part by: the UC Diversity Initiative for Graduate Study in the Social Sciences, the UC Cuba Initiative Travel Grant. 1. Also, children up to seven years old get one liter of milk daily and children from seven to 14 get one liter of yogurt daily. 2. There are also food stalls that are more heavily subsidized by the Cuban government that people often prefer to buy food from, however these stalls are not usually very well supplied. 3. Note that after converting to CUC, a Cuban worker who receives 300 national pesos a month in salary has only 12 CUC a month. 4. Historically, detailed maps of Cuba were largely unavailable because of government efforts to limit knowledge of spatial information as a matter of national security. However, in recent years with the expansion of tourism and particularly the use of rental cars by foreign clientele maps have become more commonplace. Santiagueros and probably Cubans in general do not usually orient toward space through printed maps, nor do they write down or draw pictures to spatially orient themselves. This is in part because of a recent historical absence of maps and may also be indicative of forms of spatial logics in Cuba. Because of the fact that Santiagueros orient to their landscape in other ways, my attempt to use a community mapping exercise was somewhat difficult. I solicited people to draw a map of the various routes they use for daily food acquisition and to mark the locations of markets, ration stations and other food acquisition points on a map of Santiago that I purchased at a local tourist shop. 190 napa Bulletin 32/Things Became Scarce REFERENCES CITED Alvarez, Jos´e 2004 Cuba’s Agricultural Sector. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 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