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Castro's livestock
is Cuba's laughingstock 3h305k
Carlos Alberto Montaner.
www.firmaspress.com. Posted on Tue, Aug.
10, 2004 in The
Miami Herald.
Bravo. Fidel Castro now has the dwarf cow
for which he has struggled so long. A few
days ago, Cuban news agencies told the story
of a happy peasant who had managed to raise
a new and adorable breed of domesticated
cows barely 28 inches tall, capable of giving
milk to a family trained by socialism into
the healthy habit of eating little.
The creature will provide anywhere from
6.4 to 7.4 quarts of milk a day, and it
will be possible to milk her with one hand
and applaud with the other, a trick that's
always healthy in that type of regime. After
the cow goes dry, it can be conveniently
consumed, since the animal is small and
has an atrophied pituitary -- hence its
size -- but is otherwise delicious. It is
even estimated that the cow's skin can be
used by the family -- which I presume is
named Crusoe -- to make two pairs of shoes
and a bongo to cheer up the Sunday get-togethers.
It has been a long time since Castro made
the brave decision to remake cows. At the
start of the revolution, he attempted to
create a breed of giant cows that could
provide both milk and meat. He himself conducted
the experiment on the roof of one of his
houses in central Havana, an anecdote that
Gabriel Garca Mrquez incorporated,
in disguise, into The Autumn of the Patriarch,
one of his better novels.
It was a disaster. Castro soon discovered
that if he killed the cow he lost the milk.
Later, he found out that cows specialize:
Some give good, abundant milk; others are
an ample source of meat. The breed he engineered,
in the best Marxist-Leninist tradition,
barely gave milk and barely provided meat.
It was a mess and, as such, was abandoned.
After the debacle of the communist world,
Castro returned to the topic of cows, this
time with a different plan. East
had disappeared and with it the huge amounts
of powdered milk that it donated to the
island. Simultaneously, Cuba, already bereft
of Soviet subsidies, had little fuel to
transport goods. So Castro had the bizarre
idea of deg a tiny milk cow every
Cuban family could keep at home, just as
if it were a dog.
In theory, he even solved the problem of
how to feed the animal: a tray cabinet or
pile of boxes where grass could be grown
artificially. The cow could eat from one
tray while grass grew in another. Then the
animal would raise or lower its head and
continue to eat.
The cow's droppings could be used for fuel,
as they are in India, and the younger
of the family would be entrusted to take
the cow out to urinate on the street. It
was obvious that leading a cow down and
up a five-story staircase would be a somewhat
complicated chore. But no difficulty should
paralyze the will of a true revolutionary.
Castro's dissatisfaction with the size
of animals and his plans to correct the
defects of nature are legendary. In the
1960s, he attempted to develop breeds of
huge frogs and rabbits to end the Cubans'
shortage of protein. He didn't try to cross
the animals -- his imagination has some
limits -- but he started large farms of
these breeds that eventually were abandoned.
Why? No one knows. Maybe they refused to
grow, maybe they starved to death, maybe
they fled in fear. Anything is possible
in that country.
Some day -- not today, because my space
is running out -- I shall tell you about
the time when the Comandante got the idea
to produce, drink and serve buffalo-cow
milk made into a foul-smelling yogurt. That
mania struck at a time when Castro was raising
a bear, a gift from Brezhnev, in a cage,
like a dissident, in the vast gardens of
his home.
For some strange reason, Castro came to
the conclusion that the bear would grow
strong and healthy on a diet of buffalo-cow
yogurt. However, the bear came down with
grievous intestinal spasms, shed its fur
and ended up howling like a wolf. By the
time it died, it was a thoroughly Cuban
bear.
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