Slims Restaurant

     Food and politics seem to go together in all the islands.  Fidel Castro makes a point of encouraging Cuban consumption of local foods by setting the example of eating them with gusto himself.   An amusing tale about sharing dinner with Castro is told by Lee Lockwood,a photo-journalist who spent seven days with the revolutionary leader in 1964.  They were encamped in the hills, and on the table were roast pig, ham sandwiches, squash-like malanga and foo-foo. Lockwood was baulked at trying the foo-foo, which is made of mashed plantains and which, according to him, looked like “sticky balls, the size of matzoh balls”; he avoided them, and concentrated on the meat.  But  Castro ignored the meat and piled his plate high with malanga and foo-foo.  After a while he took second helpings of these and, noticing that his visitor hadn’t even tried them, ladled some foo-foo on to Lockwood’s plate. Lockwood found the foo-foo “extremely bland, and its texture like that of raw dough.”  Apparently Castro was disappointed, for he told his guest, ” You must eat foo-foo. It is a great delicacy.  Very healthy too, very full of vitamins.  We practically lived on it in the sierra.  For us, it was our steak.  Now that i live in Havana I miss foo-foo very much.    from The Cooking of the Caribbean Islands by Linda Wolf, Time-Life Books, 1971