Cuban Kitchens: Spaces of Food and Life in Cuba

Abstract

In this photo essay I present eleven portraits of Cubans, mostly women but some men, in their kitchens. After all, kitchens are intimate spaces; they are the home’s place of sustenance, of life. But kitchens are also the physical spaces where each of us, through the act of preparing and eating food, is enmeshed in a web of much broader social, economic, and political forces. Through the daily routine of buying groceries, preparing and cooking food, and sitting down to eat, we consume and metabolize the end result of all kinds of political, economic, cultural, and environmental processes far beyond our immediate reach. The photographs are preceded by a short essay in which I frame the images in terms of gender and kitchen spaces, food security, and the very specific rural–urban dynamics present in contemporary Cuba, and the intersection of race and food.