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Cuba opens its arms wide to US foods

Cuban President Fidel Castro inspects a hamburger and milkshake during a stop on his tour of the stands at the US agribusiness exhibition, on Thursday in Havana. PHOTO: AP

M&M's are back in Cuba.

So is Wrigley's Spearmint gum, and a host of American products -- from Kellogg's Corn Flakes to Uncle Ben's rice and Sara Lee cakes -- not sold on the Communist-run island since the 1950s.

So far, however, they are just on show, tantalizingly close for many Cubans who recall the days of American influence before Fidel Castro's revolution turned to the Soviet Union and Washington slapped trade sanctions on Cuba.

Classic American household names and the fast-food king -- the burger -- went on display on Thursday at the first trade fair by major US food companies trying to take advantage of new rules and recover a market they lost four decades ago.

"As kids, we would fight for M&Ms," says Cuban journalist Enrique Lopez Oliva, 65, for whom the little candies are a symbol of his generation. "We ate them at the cinema, watching films of cowboys and gangsters."

M&Ms and chewing gum were part of the US influence in Cuba, along with baseball, basketball and the American cars of the 1950s still chugging along dilapidated streets.

"Gum was chewed here until 1961. It was sold at the cinema entrance in those days, and popcorn too," recalls Angel Tomas Gonzalez, another Cuban reporter. Castro banned gum in 1959 as ideologically unacceptable in the new socialist workers' state.

It wasn't until 1993, when Cuba was forced to accept the inevitable and legalize the dollar, the currency of its main political foe, that chewing gum reappeared.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Castro -- an avowed enemy of capitalism -- has allowed a limited opening to a free market and flirted with foreign investors.

Late last year, Cuba started buying US food -- wheat, corn, rice, chickens, apples -- after Washington eased its trade embargo under pressure from farm states and agribusiness eager to return to a traditional nearby market.

Chewing gum is among the items classified as food.

Back in the 1950s, when Havana was a playground for Americans and Mafia bosses, supermarkets sold meat that was cut and packed in the US, ready for the Cuban consumer, Oliva said.

Today, young Cubans have no "chewing-gum culture," said Gonzalez, and fast-food joints that arrived in the 1940s to replace the Spanish cafes disappeared.

Since opening up to tourism and the US dollar in the last decade, Cuba has created fast food outlets -- some called El Rapido -- that are a pale imitation.
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