From chocolate milk to light bulbs, how Fidel Castro reshaped life in Cuba
Castro expended vast quantities of time and energy remaking the minutest aspects of life in the country he ruled for nearly 50 years
Fidel Castro changed the flavour of the milk Cuban children drink at breakfast. He filled Cuban kitchens with energy-saving rice cookers, and he gave a two-hour lesson in their use live on national television. He even changed the nation’s light bulbs, launching a nationwide campaign to replace incandescent bulbs with fluorescents that cast a pallid white light in Cuban homes to this day.
Castro, who died on Friday at age 90, gained global stature with grand visions: confronting the US; building universal health care and education; sending Cuba’s doctors to heal the Third World’s sick and its soldiers to fight alongside socialist allies from Vietnam to Angola.
I know that our doctors over there in the mountains of Kashmir are drinking their chocolate every night
At home, he expended vast quantities of time and energy remaking the minutest aspects of life in the country he ruled for nearly 50 years. Obsessive, restless, fixated on details, Castro is being remembered by many Cubans for his decades of smaller-scale, often quixotic initiatives to implant Soviet-style central planning on an unruly and improvisational Caribbean island.
Even now, 10 years after Castro turned power over to his brother Raul, the artefacts of his time in command still feature in the daily lives of average Cubans, particularly those related to Castro’s passions for agricultural productivity and energy-saving. Millions of Cubans still depend on the pale-blue ration book that once provided a month’s worth of free food, reduced today to about 15 days of rice, beans, eggs, chicken, cooking oil, salt and sugar.
In November 2005, Castro tried to persuade his countrymen to also feed their children “chocolatin”, a mix of powdered milk and cocoa distributed to families in 200-gram bags.
“Seven of every 11 grams are whole milk powder, believe me,” he said. “Check it if you’re sceptical. Take it to a laboratory and test it. There’s also four grams of cocoa, which is very strong, as strong as it is healthy. I know that our doctors over there in the mountains of Kashmir are drinking their chocolate every night.”
