Cuban Rhapsody

3. Taste

The loud chatter picks up where the salsa band leaves off. It is a Friday night at Cuba Restaurant in New York and a middle-aged Cuban waiter, Sergio Pedroso, makes his way through the room of sparkling Mojitos and forks plump with congri.

He lifts a hot plate over some candles and hands off the dish to Rogelio Plasencia, a young Cuban-American sitting with some friends next to the restaurant’s cigar roller. For an instant, as the plate is passed from one generation to another, the men are bound by more than an accidental touching of hands. This is a restaurant that exemplifies traditional Spanish culture, to eat, eat and eat. They drink, they talk, and they eat. They have a discussion and they fight. They have fun, they laugh, and they eat.

It all happens at the dinner table, including a chance meeting. The two men come from very different little Havanas — Plasencia’s in Florida and Pedroso’s in Cuba — yet because of the peculiarities of Cuban history and identity, both said they didn’t really understand what it means to be Cuban — until they came to New York. It took discovering the authentic taste of Cuban congri, white rice cooked slowly with black beans and other spices, at Cuba Restaurant to find a true piece of Cuban culture.

“Once I got [to New York] it was the first time I actually felt that I was Cuban because I was so far away from the community,” Plasencia said. “I felt the longing to find something to fill the gap, to fill that emptiness. Part of it was definitely looking for food that was familiar, getting some home-cooking.” Plasencia, 21, a first-generation Cuban-American and frequent customer, said he discovered the little Cuban oasis while on a mission to find the best Cuban food in the city. The New York University student moved in 2006 to New York from Hialeah, Florida, the heart of Miami’s Cuban exile community, and where his immigrant family settled in 1983. He wanted a taste of home.

His journey took him to scores of fusion restaurants and places where the flavors just weren’t right. Cubans consider congri the quintessential dish that separates their cooking from other Caribbean cuisines and, some “Cuban” restaurants, Plasenia said, didn’t even serve that staple–or they put something as wildly inappropriate as hot sauce on the table. “If you hand a Cuban woman a pepperoni, that’s going to be too spicy for her,” Plasencia said. “Clearly they misunderstood.”

Many consider all Latin food to revolve around hot sauce and picadillo, Plasencia said, but in fact each country’s cooking is very different because of the diverse histories of the various Caribbean islands. Under the Spanish colonizers, Cuba was imperialized in the mid-19th century to grow more and more sugarcane, and many of its culinary ingredients were brought in by the field workers, most of them African slaves. Those slaves grew black beans. The Dominican Republic also uses black beans. Puerto Rico, on the other hand, favors red beans because its slaves came from a different region in Africa.

White rice is eaten almost daily in Cuba because it was popularized by Chinese contract workers who started arriving in small numbers in mid-century, and then by the thousands after Cuba finally abolished slavery in 1886. Before 1959, dozens of restaurants offered la comida china, or Chinese food. Now the numbers have dwindled, but a few remain in Havana’s very own Chinatown. The sugarcane also left its mark on the cuisine, making every Cuban drink very sweet, from the coffees to the rum-and-lime Moijtos.

Mixing these historical influences gave Cuban food a particular taste that Plasencia found at last in the Cuba Restaurant. “In every way, emotionally, everything, you feel so satisfied, finally!” Plasencia said. “It’s a smile you can’t take off your face.”

Classic Cuban cuisine also adds the rich flavors of garlic and oregano with a zesty twist of lime or bitter orange, which are usually poured over slow-cooked pork or beef. Pedroso, the Cuban waiter who has worked at the restaurant since it opened four years ago, licked his lips as he listed the ingredients to his favorite Cuban dishes. “We use the congri, the pork, the yucca,” Pedroso said. “We use the picadillo, the red snapper, the plantains; we use a lot of plantains. And I love my beans: any kind, red or black.”

Although Pedroso was born in Cuba, and lived there for the first two decades of his life, he knew almost nothing about the history of his people until he came to New York. The Cuba he grew up in didn’t use historical cooking flavors and styles because of government restrictions on ingredients. Food items were rationed and not regularly available, and mismanagement made certain items scarce. After Fidel Castro established Cuba as a communist country, everything from food to information was restricted. This absence of freedom and choice led many families, like Plasencia’s, to emigrate. One result: Pedroso said he wasn’t able to learn the history of the most basic part of his culture: food.

“When I grew up you needed special privileges to have certain things,” Pedroso said. “You really miss what you never had. Unfortunately in Cuba the history, the music, and all they want to show you, is something that relates to the revolution. You have to step back outside of it to see that the culture is so rich.”

While Plasencia has never visited Cuba and has a family in Miami, Pedroso came to America alone. Every month, he sends small remittances to his parents, and to his sister, who recently gave birth to a baby girl. ( Cubans abroad were allowed to send up to $300 per quarter to their relatives. In April, the Obama administration in April lifted all restrictions on family remittances and travel.) Though he talks to them daily via e-mail and misses them deeply, he is happy in New York, where pots of stewing beans and pigs roasting on spits are his bridge to the forbidden island.

“I know more about myself and my country since I’ve been here in the United States,” Pedroso said. “It’s very, very troubling that you have to wait, that a person has to go to a different country to feel connected to your culture.”