Like most Cubans, my elderly cousins Teresita and Pilar remembered how they had once taken for granted the centrality of products from Spain to Cuban cuisine—such as olives or cumin—before what they abstractly called “El Desastre” [The Disaster]. Wine, however, was another matter: too hot for its consumption, they claimed, Cuba had mostly been a land where people drank beer and ice-cold rum cocktails rather than wine. The only exception were the holidays. When hurricane weather gave way to cool, even chilly breezes, red wine was a seasonal pleasure, and in the Soviet era of the 1970s-80s, truly excellent wine came from Bulgaria. Having heard this story for months while researching in Cuba, I determined to track down some wine before Christmas. Riding my bike home one day in Havana, I spied several bottles of it in a roadside stand that normally sold government-issue moonshine (known locally as chispa de tren, spark from a train). Inspired, I bought a whole case! Either because it had been too long to remember how good wine tasted or because we were all determined to like it, everyone who received a bottle thanked me lavishly. Teresita and Pilar were thrilled. After one sip, they both sighed with delight. Pilar quipped, Are you sure it’s not Bulgarian? Cienfuegos, December 1999.
