Cuba Is A Tough Place For Vegetarians -- And That Won't Change Any Time Soon

8/14/2013 @ 11:09AM

Cuba Is A Tough Place For Vegetarians -- And That Won't Change Any Time Soon

Historically, Cuban cuisine has not been highly regarded–perhaps for
legitimate reasons. Until recently, most restaurants were government-run
and not subject to competitive forces, and many government-run
restaurants are designed to deliver cheap calories to the crowds rather
than to showcase culinary innovations. Furthermore, Cuba has a limited
domestic food manufacturing capacity, so many food items must be
imported. As a result, those items are expensive and (due to shipping
times) often stale. Even for food manufactured in Cuba, poor food
distribution chains hinder the quality of domestically manufactured
food. Finally, Cuban chefs inexplicably don't use a lot of spicing, so
dishes are bland.

Cuban vegetarian cuisine suffers from all of these problems and more.
Without a large customer base of vegetarian customers, most Cuban chefs
don't understand vegetarian needs. As a result, many restaurants don't
offer vegetarian options; and at the restaurants we visited, the rare
vegetarian options appearing on Cuban menus were completely uninspired
and uniformly terrible. [I'm sidestepping the challenge of confirming
that seemingly vegetarian options don't surreptitiously contain meat,
which is difficult due to both language and cultural barriers.] The
thinly stocked markets had very few non-junk-food vegetarian options,
typically imported and expensive.

The lack of vegetarianism in Cuba is all the more perplexing given the
government's central planning role. The production of meat requires
substantially more resources than the production of non-meat options
(see, e.g., this page from PETA). With the Cuban government so
resource-strapped, wouldn't it make financial sense for the Cuban
government to centrally decide to produce more vegetarian options and
produce less meat?

Of course, the cost-benefit calculus isn't so simple. Meat plays an
important part in the Cuban diet and culture. While meat may be
expensive resource-wise, the government simply can't unilaterally ignore
important cultural considerations.

Still, why did the Cuban diet become so unfriendly to vegetarianism? The
answer, I believe, lies in the type of cultural determinism I previously
discussed regarding the dead hand of the municipal planner. When the
Cuban government moved to centralized planning, it made infrastructure
investments and resource allocations based on the prevailing norms of
the time–including, in this case, the role of meat in Cuban cuisine.
Once made, the government lacked the funds to revise those investments
over time. The result is the culture/cuisine and the government's
resource allocations become interdependent–and mutually stagnant. The
government's resource allocations don't change in a way that spurs
cultural changes, and there aren't a lot of exogenous cultural changes
to spur government resource reallocations. In this case, there's little
consumer demand for vegetarian options; and without a change in the
government's resource allocations to make vegetarianism easier and
cheaper, it's unlikely that consumer demand will materialize. (Indeed,
in the 2000s, the government launched several vegetarian-only
restaurants in Havana; all of them failed and switched back to serving
meat). There are many reasons to oppose socialism, but I hadn't fully
appreciated the stifling nature of its cultural ossification and
cultural determinism until visiting Cuba.

With limited government-subsidized vegetarian options, eating vegetarian
is an expensive luxury. For example, we stopped at a lovely farmer's
market with a decent array of options, but prices were comparable to
those in the United States, well out of reach of Cuba's lower class and
perhaps prohibitive even to Cuba's (small) middle class. One of Havana's
two vegetarian-oriented restaurant (La Buena Vida in Havana's Miramar
district)—a paladir, a non-state-run restaurant in someone's private
home—was also financially prohibitive to most Cubans. (That, and the
terrible food, might explain why we were their only customers the night
we went). In contrast, the ubiquitous government-subsidized restaurants
offered cheap options like ham and cheese sandwiches, even though the
government's production costs surely vastly exceed the production costs
of equivalent vegetarian calories. Ironically, it's cheaper for Cubans
to eat meat than to be vegetarian, even though the social costs of that
consumption pattern are the opposite.

We did find one acceptable vegetarian restaurant outside of Havana, El
Romero, at an eco-resort called Las Terrazas. Presumably catering
principally to international tourists and facing limited competition
from other local restaurants in the small tourist-oriented town, the
restaurant has found a way to stay in business. I asked the owner why
there weren't more vegetarian offerings in Cuba, but I didn't get a
clear answer. I did learn, however, that he wasn't a vegetarian at home.

[This is the second of a three-part series of posts about my March 2013
visit to Cuba.]

Source: "Cuba Is A Tough Place For Vegetarians -- And That Won't Change
Any Time Soon - Forbes" -
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericgoldman/2013/08/14/cuba-is-a-tough-place-for-vegetarians-and-that-wont-change-any-time-soon/