This week, in the market of 19 and B in El Vedado, black beans reappeared after being absent for days from the stalls
14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, 3 September 2024 — She has never left Cuba, but the crisis has forced her to learn the names of some basic products from other countries. Janet now knows that corn is also called ‘choclo,’ that avocado is called ‘palta‘ in some parts of Latin America and that lemon is the sonorous ‘lima persa‘ (Persian lime) in other places. But it’s the beans that are known by the most names. Faced with the fall in national production, this 42-year-old from Havana has to buy imported beans that say ‘porotos‘ or ‘alubias‘ rather than ‘habichuelas‘ on the package.
“At first I often made a fool of myself by asking the MSME on the corner if what is called ‘caraota’ is cooked in the same way as our beans,” the woman recalls. “In my house I had never bought anything foreign; what we did all our lives was go to the agromarket and choose between the Creole products, which we liked the most.” But the plummeting of national production, the high prices of the legume that comes out of the Cuban fields and the presentation, many times, in packages of poor quality with split beans or stones included, have pushed Cuban diners to prefer the imported beans .
“If he were alive now and saw that we prefer the alubias and
