As anyone who spent time in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union can attest, pizza—made from a modicum of ingredients and (euphemistically speaking) a unique variety of “cheese”—became nearly ubiquitous in the 1990s. Originally costing only ten pesos (or fifty US cents) for a folded-over, newspaper-wrapped slice, the hot, gooey meal could taste like heaven to Cubans, most of whose incomes hovered around twenty US dollars a month. By 2016, however, there were lots of “fancy” privately and government-owned restaurants that offered pizza on their menus alongside broiled fish and the like. To justify the relatively expensive price of approximately five US dollars a pie, restaurants provided a highly generous portion size. Accompanied by the bemused historian Genesis Lara, my son Elías loved that policy. Havana, June 2016.
