Here my uncle Tiki Guerra stands with his wife’s nephew Luis, and Mingo, a long-time friend and former small farmer whose land once bordered my grandparents in Marcos Vásquez, Pinar del Río. They pose with the recently slaughtered pig that my gift of twenty-five dollars in June of the previous year had allowed them to buy, feed and fatten in time for my return trip to Cuba in the early fall of 1996. More than a dozen neighbors participated in the cleaning and preparation of the pig, particularly in the cutting and frying of what seemed like a thousand chicharrones (seasoned pork rinds) in giant cauldrons over an open fire of marabú. This was the first pig that anyone in the family had enjoyed since the early 1980s when Tiki had given up his farm to the Cuban state. Special Period reforms allowing Cubans to raise pigs in urban spaces (including Havana) were meant to increase citizens’ access to protein, but they also enabled a collective return to cultural traditions long abandoned because of austerity, government restrictions and rationing. When Pope John Paul II began to negotiate the terms of a state visit in 1998, these terms included the legal return of Christmas in December 1996 for the first time since Fidel Castro officially eliminated it in 1969. More unforgettable than the taste of this palm-nut-fed, well-tended pig for me were the many conversations I had with young Cubans who peppered me that Christmas eve night with a barrage of questions about the identity of Jesus Christ as well as the meaning and origins of Christmas.
