In apparent effort to compete with foreign standards for providing cheap fastfood, the Cuban government opened a state-owned chain of small restaurants called El Rápido [The Fast One]. To no-one’s surprise, service was slow, servings of French fries were always half the size of their pre-fabricated container and the ketchup was so watered down that Cubans called it zúmate, a play on the word “zumo” meaning juice, tomate meaning tomato and “zum-zum” or the sound of a car revving its engines. The problem, as all customers guessed, was that workers’ decades-long practice of pilfering and reselling (or simply consuming) food that predominated in government distribution centers for allegedly guaranteed rations also came to define the new Communist-run, state-owned capitalist sector. Aquí funciona el motor, lo que nunca el carro, one customer told me. La Rampa, Havana, 1997.
