IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 84

Roast pork on a spit
The greatest contribution of African culture to our
food may be that it recreated its flavors with local
resources. Female slaves were in charge of domestic work in their owner’s homes, and this was
not limited to cooking, washing, or cleaning, but
also included nursing their owner’s children, too.
As Elías Entralgo states in La liberación étnica
cubana [Cuban Ethnic Liberation] (1953),
“they’d carry them, cradle them, put them to
sleep, put food they had prepared in their mouths,
play with them, excite their imaginations with
their first stories.” Similarly, in “La huella africana en Cuba,” ISLAS 1 (2005), Juan Antonio Alvarado also asked himself “how many imprints of
ancestral African cultures might have gone on to
shape the new, criollo being as a social being?
It’s perfectly understandable that the African wet
nurse would in essence affect their preferences in
such basic things as nutrition, play and language
during early infancy.”

All this cultural influence took place inevitably,
despite the fear of blacks there was throughout almost the entire nineteenth century, to paraphrase
Jorge Camacho in “El veneno de la raza” [The
Poison of Race] IDENTIDADES 1 (2014). This
fear was a real unease among whites, resulting
from the possibility that thousands of African
slaves could rebel and destroy them, as has happened in Haiti.
A blatant example of habits we’ve inherited from
the Africans when we prepare and serve dishes is
the consumption of rice, on its own or mixed
with beans. Rice and beans is an essential rule
in Cuban food that is a practically absent from
Spanish food. Other traditions that seem to be African in origin are cooking techniques like roasting pork on a spit and farina dumplings that are
added to bean or meat stews. We have traced this
last item back to the Haitians who lived in the
sugar regions of Camagüey and Oriente.
To determine the degree to which Africans contributed to the Cuban table and a deeper study of
the reasons for the lack of information about this
requires experts and further research. Niuka
Núñez and Estrella González’s contribution to the
Atlas Ethnográfico de Cuba [Ethnographic Atlas
of Cuba] (1998), “Antecedentes históricos de la
alimentación tradicional en Cuba” [Historical
Antecedents of Traditional Food in Cuba], shows
the most recent, solid results. Yet, to minimize the
African contribution would be unforgiveable. It
would deprive us of being able to identify the
wonderful flavor of each and every one of the ingredients in the recipe for an ajiaco stew.
.

84