Mothers Day in Cuba
By Aurelio Pedroso
Well, there she is, and I can’t resist the temptation to walk over to her. The woman is sitting inside a kiosk, about 4 square meters, surrounded by Mothers Day cakes. That’s all you can buy there – the product of a pastry chef capable of making them at the rate of two a minute, with his eyes closed.
Because Mothers Day will not be celebrated for days, the vendor has no customers, so she spends the time resting her ample mammaries on the counter (the pun is intentional) and watching passers-by on the Vedado’s ever-popular Twelfth Street. Probably unthinkingly, she encourages them to look at her sources of life and the cakes beyond.
I ask her if the cakes are good and if she has tasted them. Her answer is swift: “No, hon, I don’t eat pastries or bread, ’cause I’m on a diet.” I tell her that I walk daily past her stand and see the same cakes on display. “You’re wrong, darling, because they’re changed every day.”
The cakes are made at a bakery/pastry shop near the kiosk, at 12th and 17th, and cost about a dollar each (20 Cuban pesos). The shop is managed by the EPIA, the Provincial Food Industries Enterprise. One cake looks good and I buy it so I can take it to the office and write this article with greater pleasure.
The cake is round and can be cut into eight or ten servings. The cardboard box says “Much happiness, Mom,” in words surrounded by red and white roses. The frosting couldn’t be simpler. The icing on the circumference is white meringue; the topping is chocolate with meringue and yellow decorations.
Back at the office, I cut the first slice and, like a miracle, two women instantly appear at my desk. They are illegal, er, unofficial street vendors. One is white, in her 60s, skinny enough to be bowled over by the breeze, sells potatoes stuffed with minced U.S. turkey. I give her a sample of cake. “Good flavor, good meringue, but the cake itself is somewhat dry.”
I give a piece to the other woman, black, the same age but heavier, who sells eggs from a basket. “Tha’s good, tha’s good.” And tha’s all she says. I agree with both and give them my best wishes for Mothers Day.
In a world with so much technology and numbers, where you have to accept as valid a study conducted by such-and-such research center that says (for example) that flies defecate 7.5 times a day, it would be interesting to find out how many Cuban mothers and their children are separated on this day.
A serious study would place Cuban mothers near the top of the list but, since this is a day of celebration and remembrance, may this column serve as a channel for a child’s greeting to his or her mother, wherever she may be – living in Hialeah, or in a prison in a western province of the island, or in a hospital, or saving lives as a health-care professional in a distant village in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala.
I look at the cake and keep on thinking. This time, I think of the mothers who lost their sons in the wars in Angola and Ethiopia, where I was once present.
On this ninth day of May 2010, a Happy Mothers Day. A very happy day.
