Why return ? / Por que regresar?

                                                            Students hitch hiking.

Cuban scenary.

Sometimes Cubans wonder why exiles and Cubans who have immigrated to another country, do return to visit. The people whose biggest ambition was to leave Cuba as soon as possible and now wish to revisit as much as possible.

It is very different to revisit Cuba and travel in an air conditioning rent a car compared to trying to hitch hike in the boiling sun for hours on end, the Cuban way. Looking out the landscape from a comfortable air conditioning car you see the beauty of the countryside and it is sharp colors like a postcard, as you have never seen it before.

Local Cubans wonder if Cuba has something special. I guess you have to be an emigrated to know this. That only when you leave that land is that you start loving it a little. That for us the magic is that back there are the places that are especial for us in our minds, our first school, the language, the neighbors, our first teacher, the road where we learnt to ride our first bike.

It is like going through a photo album of our lives (especially in Cuba where not much change) it is the place where we did belong, it is our past and that is the reason why we love to comeback.

Sometimes we are too busy with our present and in not mood to go there but we arrive and we fall in love with that place again.

Pulses or grains. / Granos o legumbres.

We Cubans live on a diet predominately based on legumes, so it is not a surprise I often cook black beans. Introduced to Cuba by the Spaniards, grains are very nutritious, they are an excellent source of iron, potassium, vitamin B6 and folic acid.

I was surprised to find they are one of the cheapest foods here in Australia.
Pulses and Grains were known as the food for the poor but nowadays everybody recognizes their value as a healthy meal and more westerners are moving away from a predominantly meat form of diet.

I prefer to buy canned cannellini beans, lentils, and chickpeas as in their dry form they may require to be soaked previously and I like cooking to be easy.
Lately I have developed my own recipe to get the best out of what the can provides, my favorite is lentils soup.

Lentils soup

(Same recipe for cannellini beans)

½ Spanish chorizo cut in coin size
2 shallots or 2 green onions (or 1 brown onion)
1 garlic clove minced
½ teaspoon of cumin

1 tomato
1 bay leave
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
thyme
1 can of lentils
1cup chicken stock

Put the chorizo in a hot saucepan and cook for a few minutes until you get their orange oil; put the chorizo away on a plate until later.
Use this oil to cook the shallots and garlic for 3 minutes.
Add cumin and stir for 1 minute.

And then add the lentils (without rinsing) stock, chorizo, red wine vinegar, tomato, bay leave, thyme; let it boil and simmer gently for 10 minutes or so.
You can serve this soup with a lime wedge.

Train journey. / Viaje en tren.

Recently my husband and I caught a train to visit the Brisbane EKKA (exhibition). It was nice to sit in cushion seats in air conditioning. The train traveled fast.

Once in a small town in Cuba my husband asked his friend what was wrong with getting the train? So my husbands friend laughed on his way up to the nearest train to show him what a Cuban train looks like inside.

For a Cuban to imagine my Australian husband hopping on a Cuban train is hilarious. I imagine him sweating heavily walking elbow to elbow amongst Cubans carrying sacks of rice, beans or fish on their backs.

Actually, if you compare traveling by train, they are not as terrible as buses, their disadvantage is that they are too slow, like doing a 50 km journey can take 3 hours. But you can have your seat and do not have to argue with anybody for it, the seat would be very hard anyway.

In this sort of trip you can see the real Cuba, a Cuba that is not glamorous at all. People will be selling goods and if you forget about the hard seat and the slow trip you can have fun watching and listening to the Cubans selling things like sweet cookies or roast peanut. People in the train, unless they are students, look pretty poor but are friendly.

I experienced the train one summer from Havana to Sancti Spiritus and it was almost unbelievable that I survived the heat; generally a Cuban train does not have air conditioning. Warning: Do not dare to go to the toilet.

On my trips to school or to Havana in 2001 I was never lucky enough to see any fast trains in Cuba .I thought it was a myth, everybody mentions it but nobody has seen one.

One night the train to Havana was cancelled and a friend and I slept in the train station holding our luggage as we could between our legs so nobody would rob us of our most precious possessions. Any possession for a Cuban is precious. As a student our worst nightmare was to be robbed.

Some days we were lucky we could buy a ticket paying around 3 dollars to the inspectors, but that night there was no train running so we could not travel either with the extra cash.

In 1837 Cuba was one of the first countries to have railway in Latin America and the Iberian world.