Consider the Cuban Lobster
The allegory of lobsters in Cuba.
“Lobster again?” someone asks.
Clearly, our group is grappling with serious first world problems.
We’re at a paladar — a privately owned and operated Cuban restaurant — and we’re each deciding on a dish for dinner. Cuba is not exactly a haven for the gourmet pallate; while you do get the occasional eggplant caviar or an ingenious platter of tapas, more typical Cuban meals consist of burrito ingredients without the tortilla. White rice, black beans, and a smattering of meat of your choice: chicken, lobster, pork, lobster, beef, fish, or — did I mention lobster?
Lobster was on the menu at nearly every paladar. And with Cuban lobsters, when it rains, it pours. Order the lobster, and you’ll get two, sometimes three lobster tails, each heavy with tender white lobster meat, grilled, with no seasoning. They serve lobster by the pound; you would think they were trying to get rid of it.
Having experienced this glut of lobster everywhere we went, we assumed that lobster was simply abundant enough to be a staple meat.
Imagine our surprise when, on the second to last day of our trip, we learned the truth about the lobster black market in Cuba. During a day trip to a rural area near Havana (close to where the lobsters are caught), Arianna, our local guide, finally told us what the deal was with Cuban lobsters.
It turns out that lobster is a rarity in Cuba. Not only is lobster expensive to obtain, but lobster sales are restricted: lobster is reserved for tourists and for export. And in a country that imports 80% of what it consumes, developing an export food item is tricky.
(While this was several years ago, one paladar was apparently shut down for having too much lobster.)
Back on the tour bus. We’re making our way to Valle Viñales, where we’ll visit a tobacco farm and a cigar factory.
There is a place on the Cuban coastline, a three hour drive east from Havana, just north of Valle Viñales, where lobsters can be caught right on the coast. They are plentiful enough that you can catch them with your bare hands and a bucket.
And here, on the highway to Havana that our tour bus is traversing, is where the police patrol for… lobster pirates. This is a highway of routine lobster traffic stops; the police check for fresh lobster like Arizona Border Patrol agents checking for migrants or drugs.
The price of getting caught? 2,000 CUCs ($2,000): more than a year’s wages.
On top of the risk of getting caught transporting lobster, is the complication of “The Boat Question.” With a long history of refugees attempting to leave Cuba by boat, with the United States 90 miles from the Cuban shore, and with the “Wet Foot Dry Foot Law” in the United States, which grants any Cuban who sets foot on U.S. soil to declare that they are Cuban and obtain residency rights in the United States, the Cuban government has reason to be wary of Cubans travelling by boat.
As recently as 2003, a group of armed Cubans hijacked a commuter ferry and attempted to sail to the United States. The ferry ran out of gas, and after a two day standoff, it was commandeered by the Cuban government and returned to Cuba. Several of the hijackers involved were executed within the week.
One consequence of this event is, Cubans are not allowed to travel by boat, unless they have a license (fishermen, for example). And even then, they are restricted in how far from the island they are permitted to travel.
But even with these substantial hurdles to obtaining lobster, the law of supply and demand still holds, and the black market for lobster still exists in Havana.
The lobster black market is not a place where you can go. Rather, it comes to your front door; a knock on the door, and you are suddenly presented with the opportunity to buy lobster. Be prepared, and act fast — because it may be your last opportunity for a while.
Why on earth, then, we were all wondering, were we being treated to overly-decadent lobster feasts, great piles of lobster meat, when lobster was so scarce?
The answer is, plastic bags.
But to understand the connection between lobsters and plastic bags, we have to learn some anatomy first. On the bus to Valle Viñales, we were treated to an anatomy lesson by Arianna. She began by asking us, “What are the three parts of the body?” When a confused silence settled over the bus, she demanded sharply, “Haven’t any of you taken an anatomy class before?” She then patiently explained, as though describing the anatomy of a novel species of insect, that the human body consists of three parts: head, torso, and extremities.
But Cubans have a fourth body part: plastic bags. Just as Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy stated that “a towel… is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have,” so a plastic bag is about the most massively useful thing a Cuban can have.
Having lived through a period of severe material shortages after the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, the so-called “Special Period” (which, as our tour guide at the Christopher Columbus Cemetery told us, “was not very special at all”), Cubans never miss an opportunity to fill a plastic bag with leftovers to take home for dinner. And plastic bags serve other useful functions as well; for example, covering your face to protect your identity if and when you are inevitably required to defecate in public. (True story.)
Back to the lobsters.
Tourists can only eat so much lobster. Let’s denote the amount of lobster a tourist can eat as X. Then if a paladar serves the tourist a larger amount of lobster, which we’ll call Y, then the amount of leftover lobster that ends up in plastic bags is Y minus X.
Now it should start making sense.
Understanding the black market for lobster in Cuba will get you a long way toward understanding the national character of Cuba. It ties in elements of Cuban character (taking a little bit and stretching it a long way), Cuban history (the Special Period of the 90s and ubiquitous plastic bags), and Cuban black markets (knock knock, who’s there, the Cuban black market).
But that’s not gonna stop me from complaining about all this damn lobster…
