The telenovela has gained an importance in the everyday lives of Cubans in quarantine that we could have never imagined. Photo credit: Startup Cuba

Just like the old days. In spring 2002, I spent a semester as a study abroad student at the University of Havana. Those were different times, with just two TV channels — Cubavisión, “el canal de la familia cubana” and Telerebelde, “el canal de los deportes en Cuba.”

Back then, I quickly found that the best way to break the ice in a conversation with virtually any Cuban… was to get them talking about the previous night’s telenovela.

Each night after the evening news there were just two viewing options for Cubans of all ages: sports or the telenovela. I lived in a house with eight other students and after dinner and the evening news I would settle down with a couple of my classmates and the night watchman to immerse ourselves in the worlds created for us by Globo (the second largest media conglomerate in the world) and the Instituto Cubano de Radio y Televisión (the Cuban publicly owned media agency). Back then, I quickly found that the best way to break the ice in a conversation with virtually any Cuban, from school kids to retirees and pretty much everyone in between, was to get them talking about the previous night´s telenovela.

Fast forward 18 years… I find myself once again sitting down on a couch in a Havana living room, this time… I’m in the company of my wife and our baby.

Fast forward 18 years and after dinner and the evening news I find myself once again sitting down on a couch in a Havana living room, this time instead of my roommates and a night watchman I’m in the company of my wife and our baby. Throughout the years a lot has changed. Cubans on the island today have a lot more options for kicking back and disconnecting in the evenings: first VHS, then DVD players and bootleg DVDs, and more recently the arrival of the Paquete has changed the media landscape forever, along with mobile Internet and YouTube. Breaking the ice by asking a stranger to catch you up on the novela doesn´t have the charm it once did to give Cubans of all ages and walks of life something to talk about.

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However, over the last couple months of quarantine, something strange has happened. The coronavirus has brought us together in unexpected ways. At 9 pm as the Cañonazo sounds over the bay, throughout the city of Havana people step onto their balconies or into their doorways and join their neighbors in applauding to show their support for the essential personnel that work hard to keep us all safe. Then, despite the varied programming on our 11 television stations and all the other options we have for entertainment, we go back into our living rooms and sit down in front of the Cuban novela on Cubavision. This novela, El rostro de los días, centers around a fictional hogar materno in Havana and the lives of the people who work there and their patients.

However, over the last couple months of quarantine, something strange has happened. The coronavirus has brought us together in unexpected ways.

Within minutes of the novela ending, social media is buzzing with reactions to the latest episode. I’ve found four visible private groups in Facebook with 188,119 members, 52,067 members, another with 21,696. The fourth private group opened just a week ago with 4,367 members and by the time you read this there might very well be more! In WhatsApp and Telegram both official and unofficial groups have been formed where Cubans meet to discuss the novela — some praise it, but many come together to joke about the 80s teased layered hairdos of many characters, the main female protagonist’s undying love of the color blue, and her mother’s obsession with lounging around the house dressed to the nines as if she were just about to leave for her box seat in the ballet or the opera, and, of course, the gaping holes in the plot. This novela was never meant to be seen by millions of viewers around the world, but thanks to Covid that is just what is happening.

The novela is also being posted on YouTube channels like Antena Cubana, Canal Cubano, Kinkalla TV and A lo Cubano, and the Facebook buzz has Cubans living outside the island tuning in to assuage their FOMO. Antena Cubana transmits the novela live with open chat as thousands tune in from around the world. Episode 75 alone had 82,323 views. Between episodes the memes begin to flow and the variety of the memes tells us something about how diverse the watchers really are.

One Cuban, Mary Lou, left the island a year ago and is living in Miami. For the last month she has become a novela watcher again, just like when she was back in Cuba.

Today the novela has gained an importance in the everyday lives of Cubans in quarantine that we could have never imagined. One Cuban, Mary Lou, left the island a year ago and is living in Miami. For the last month she has become a novela watcher again, just like when she was back in Cuba. She started watching when a friend back in Cuba started posting satirical critiques of each episode on Facebook. The summaries were so funny that she realized that she was going to have to watch the novela to get all the inside jokes. Thanks to YouTube she was able to binge watch until she was almost caught up and now watches three days a week. “I’ve always watched the novela because at home my mom has always watched the novela, and my brother says he doesn’t, but he gets hooked, too. And I make fun of it, I really enjoy that.” Sheepishly she admits that on the off-days she started watching the rest of the episodes she had missed. “I sit down to watch it at 9pm when I get home from work and then I go to sleep — my cat and I have a new routine. It also creates a feeling of community, and it feels like home, it reminds me of home, making fun of the novela.”

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The novela is also a way to connect with friends around the world: “My friends who have also immigrated at the same time I did, a good friend who is in Spain, she’s also watching it. She isn’t as patient and committed as I am to watching all the episodes, but she watches, too. She started recently and I’ve caught her up on who the characters are.”

Within minutes of the novela ending, social media is buzzing with reactions to the latest episode. I’ve found four visible private groups in Facebook with 188,119 members, 52,067 members, another with 21,696.

Photo: Antena Cubana

Back in Havana, Lis explains to me that “I think the novela has become so important because it’s something to think about that isn’t stress and Coronavirus. It’s a way to have catharsis and make community. I’ve made new friends on Facebook and in chats reading the comments that people make and you see people who think like you and defend the things you believe in. I have friends now in Santiago that I know that someday, when we can travel again, I could call them up and say we’re coming and they’d welcome my whole family with open arms. That’s pretty amazing. I can’t go outside, I can’t hug my friends, but we’ve found a way to be social and stay active.”

La novela is definitely the number one trending topic in Cuban meme production in recent weeks. As such I´m sure it has done its part in keeping Cubans on the island consuming megas and ETECSA in business. But it also has stimulated debate about serious stuff, like believing girls and protecting them from sexual violence. It’s easy to laugh at El rostro de los días¸ but on the Cuban redes (social networks) people are also outraged about the silences in the novela, and worried about the ways in which these silences seem to point to growing conservativism in Cuban society. The novela’s silence on important topics like abortion, rape, same sex relationships, and intimate partner violence, are a warning to not take for granted the reproductive rights that Cuban women have enjoyed for decades, the victories of CENESEX’s campaigns for LGBT inclusion, and the activism that has broken down myths about gender violence.

What is going to happen after the novela? No one knows. But at least right now, for as long as the novela lasts, each of us in our little Covid bubbles, whether in Havana, Santiago, Miami or Madrid will sit down on the couch together after clapping for our doctors at 9 pm, and like we did back in the day, hum along to the catchy theme song.

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Our survey of over 500 of our followers showed that not only do 43% of you dislike the term “Latinx,” but another 42% have never even heard of it. Photo credit: Startup Cuba

Before we went on an end-of-summer hiatus, we asked you, our followers, what you think about the term Latinx (pronounced la-TEEN-ex, rhymes with Kleenex) as a catch-all for the group formerly known as Latinos and Hispanics. It turns out that 500 of you had strong feelings — not only do 43% of you dislike “Latinx,” another 42% have never even heard of the term. 

Latinx is meant to be an inclusive term that is welcoming of transgender and non-binary people without giving hierarchical preference to masculine forms. 

When Latinx came onto the scene a few years ago, many were eager to share their opinions on the issue, mostly among a highly educated and “woke” subset of the population that would fall under its theoretical umbrella. The debate has had a resurgence with all the talk about the influence of the Latino/Latinx vote at the fore of the presidential election, along with our perennial debate on identity brought about by the U.S. Census. Not only are Latinos relatively undercounted, some people who are forced to mark off Latino/Hispanic would prefer to identify as something more specific, such as chicano, or Borderlanders, Brazilian Americans, or boricuas, or any number of potential checkboxes.

Photo credit: NBC News

So, what is the fuss about Latinx, and what is it trying to accomplish? Like lots of other languages, Spanish defers to the masculine plural when referring to groups of things or people (“Latinos” includes men and women, just as “tus hermanos” can refer to your six sisters and one brother, more akin to the neutral “siblings” in English). Latinx is meant to be an inclusive term that is welcoming of transgender and non-binary people without giving hierarchical preference to masculine forms. 

Referring to the Latino/Latinx population as a monolith is like saying that all New Englanders think alike, or all Scandinavians eat fish.

Latinx —though it has cousins in the 90s-era Latin@s and in the new-agey Latines— is primarily a United States convention, leading some to consider the term an overly intellectualized imperialistic imposition that has no place in their daily vernacular. Before Latinx there was “Hispanic” (hispanos), which for many harkens back to colonial Spanish America, hardly representative of all the millions of people from Latin America currently living in the United States whose heritage languages are just as likely to be Portuguese or Quechua, Nahautl, or other Amerindian languages.

Ed Morales, a Columbia University professor who wrote Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture told culture reporter Concepción de León that “the X, which is so strange and is not Spanish, sort of marks this new hybrid idea … I thought it was a futurist term, imagining a future of more inclusion for people that don’t conform to the various kinds of rigid identities that exist in the United States.” Speaking of the future, a recent report, El español: una lengua viva, projects that by 2060 the United States will have the second-largest Spanish-speaking population after Mexico.

“The X, which is so strange and is not Spanish, sort of marks this new hybrid idea.”

Ed Morales, Columbia University

But the issue of Census categorization goes beyond the linguistic: Referring to the Latino/Latinx population as a monolith is like saying that all New Englanders think alike, or all Scandinavians eat fish. It is to ignore individualism and generational differences and, most importantly, the fact that Latin American immigrants come to the United States from over twenty countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and that diversity in culture, customs and beliefs evolves as it is passed down to children and grandchildren. Two-thirds of the population considered Latino was born in the United States. And did you know that the concept of “Latin America” as a region dates back only to the 1860s, when Frenchmen under Napoleon III coined the term seeking to forge an inclusive “Latin race” that would align the people of the Americas more closely with Latin Europe? But we digress.

Playing dominoes in Domino Park on Calle Ocho, Miami. Photo credit: Startup Cuba

Speaking Spanish is not a prerequisite of the category of Latinx — on the contrary, and somehow the ‘x’ seems to broaden the scope of the term. Though Merriam-Webster added it to the dictionary in September 2018, a quick search of that king of the Spanish language, the Real Academia Española, yielded the following response: “Aviso: La palabra latinx no está en el Diccionario.” Essentially the equivalent to a 404 Error message. Now there’s a snub.

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Chef Louie Estrada teaches his recipe for traditional ropa vieja from his home kitchen in Brooklyn.

The other night was the second best night of my life. Chef Louie Estrada taught me and close to 100 others how to make his ropa vieja recipe, live.

Karen Vierbuchen’s setup during the live ropa vieja class. Photo credit: Karen Vierbuchen

At the time of writing this article, the first best night of my life hasn’t happened yet. It’s gonna happen though — I’ve already made sure of it. That’s when we’re bringing Chef Louie back again. Only this time it’s to teach us all how to make his flan.

Flan. Yes. Flan. Look out, Chef Louie Estrada. Teach me to make your flan and you’re going to get a big fat beso. Estoy emocionado. Super emocionado.

Best night of your life too, right?

By way of background, Louie Estrada is the Chef/Owner of My Cuban Spot in Gowanus, Brooklyn. He’s quickly become regarded as one of NYC’s hottest new chefs and deserves every accolade he receives as a chef and a gentleman. He’s been seen in everything from the New York Times, Buzzfeed, NY Eater, Beat Bobby Flay on the Food Network and now of course, the crème de la crème (insert self-indulgent drumroll in my head here), Startup Cuba. And, it’s because his food —and his ventanita, which pushes back at the NYC winter with the force of a 90-degree humid Miami afternoon— is delicious and equally as important, welcoming.

“Very entertaining and so happy to learn some Cuban recipes from an expert. Please offer more!!!”

Ropa Vieja Class Participant

The stages of Karen’s ropa vieja. Photo credit: Karen Vierbuchen

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Louie’s ropa vieja recipe is traditional, handed down from his abuelos. It takes time to make. Our class lasted three hours. But, from the searing of the flank steak to the smell of the flavors melding together, it truly is an experience. If you’re Cuban, Cuban-American or you simply want to learn how to make your first Cuban dish, this is the one for you. The ingredients are all easily acquired at home, your local supermarket or online. Just add Louie’s skill and a little patience and you’ll have your neighbors knocking on your door with an empty plate.

“It was fun..detailed and just a great vibe!”

Ropa Vieja Class Participant

The ropa vieja “panelists” with Chef Louie Estrada leading the way. Photo credit: Karen Vierbuchen

Chef Louie Estrada’s Ropa Vieja Recipe Shopping List

Although this ingredient list may feel intimidating, Louie breaks it down really well. Watch, or flip through, the video above for his lesson. I’ve linked to where you can buy the dry and canned ingredients on Amazon that are good quality, yet relatively reasonably priced, if you just want to have them delivered to you.

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