… so, Borscht Doesn’t Mix into the Ajiaco?: An Essay of Self-Ethnography on the Young Post-Soviet Diaspora in Cuba

Abstract

As the progenitor of an anthropological tradition, Fernando Ortiz is a practically inevitable reference, yet he is also a kind of enabling constraint when it comes to talking about Cubanness. His vision of Cuba as an ajiaco is part of the normalized discourse of identity, as it is used by mainstream intellectuals both on and off the archipelago. “Ethnologist” and “native” at the same time, Ortiz is more than a critic, for he was received as a mediator between “deep Cuba” and the “republic of letters.”³ His work was interpreted as a necessary and belated postscript to a nontext: the dialogue that never took place between the “low” culture of the slave barracks and the “high” culture of the Catholic Seminario de San Carlos. In its day, for the interracial phenomenon known as mestizaje to have achieved an ontological status was quite an achievement, though many contemporary interpretations have generated all sorts of stereotypes—essentialist, ethnicist, racialized, and even racist—around the notion of what is Cuban: notions of an exclusionary Cubanness, the mobility of which is purely mechanical and in which, one would assume, power and lost memory are key elements. There is a sense of widespread resistance to understanding how these limitations work within the native ontology of Cuba. As a result, the mystery of the ajiaco is reduced to the study of its ingredients and the experience of sampling the new flavors that come out of it, without ever truly grasping the process by which it is prepared.

“Thank goodness they left, and that Soviet culture didn’t leave its mark on Cuba … now we don’t have to eat their greasy, repulsive borscht … [sustained applause].”

—Cuban historian, at an official meeting of intellectuals

“It is curious that we didn’t refer to them by their nationality, Soviets, much less as “comrades,” but that we used a noun whose phonetics did not allow for details. They were “los bolos”: unformed, coarse, an unworked piece of mud; massive and without grace ( … )What paralyzed us about them was the bear-like power that emanated from their gestures and the veiled warning with which they sustained our Caribbean “paradise.” ( … )The mixture of fear and mockery that the Bolos generated in us still remains”²

—Yoani Sánchez