One reason most foreigners who visit Cuba love the country relates to the absence of traffic, of noise from traffic and—with the singular exception of Havana—of the pollution that thousands of old cars and government trucks (most still lacking catalytic converters) creates. In the interior, however, once abundant wildlife like the boar, turkey and land crab captured here are inexplicably hard to find. When one talks to rural Cubans about it, most invariably shrug and say: “Se lo comieron hace años [They ate that long ago].” For most outsiders, of course, their reaction is disturbing or anti-environmental. We are ignorant of the general “disappearance” of meat on government rations since the 1960s. We don’t know about the extreme lack of diverse, affordable vegetables in any Cuban diet. Yet for the poor majority of Cuba, perhaps like those of other countries, eating a piece of turkey, jutía (a kind of native opossum), Cuban pheasant or wild turkey might vary an unvarying diet of plain, white rice, stale-tasting, unseasoned beans or the endless ration of chícharo, yellow split peas. Eating wild turkey or the like is also often a once-in-a-lifetime event because of its rarity and the fact that killing of wild fauna like turkey, deer or boar is strictly prohibited by the state. Communist law considers such wildlife the property of the state, whether or not they are endangered. Thus, killing them, even to feed a family, is called “poaching” in the local political parlance. July 2003.
