New Bakeries in Cuba

[El Presidente]

 

HAVANA TIMES – Privately-owned bakeries have opened across Havana, for some time now. Many families in my town have set up a counter and a shelf in their garage or doorway to their house and have set up their own bakery.

 

 

 

I’m explaining all of this so I can tell you what happened to me one morning. We were a group of people waiting for the soft bread rolls. Suddenly, a foreigner – European looking – comes out of nowhere and asks me in perfect Spanish if we were all waiting for bread. There were only three of us and we nodded that we were. Then, the unexpected happened. The foreigner played the foreigner a little more and came up to me and asked:

“This means that there isn’t any bread.” I told him that we were waiting for a specific kind of bread and I pointed out the glass display where there were other kinds of bread. Then, the insulted foreigner told me that he didn’t understand how we Cubans could waste so much time, but he couldn’t waste it, “Plus, I’m in a real hurry.”

Then, the sales clerk intervened and kindly showed him the other bread on offer and explained that we Cubans don’t like to waste our time either, although he admitted that we do in fact lose a lot of time in Cuba. “But it isn’t our fault,” the baker gently said. Without even looking at him, the foreigner picked out his bread and replied, “In Cuba, you live with your back to Time and this is something you can see a mile away.”

 

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