Punk Poet Paradise

Il faut étre absolument moderne

Or postmodern. Which I'm not. At least not absolument. You see, I've never taken Uber. I like taxicabs, particularly the now gone and ridiculously comfortable Checker cabs that felt like I was riding in a limo but without the pretentiousness. Today, spaciousness is offered by taxicab minivans, but they're not the same. Too soccer-mom/dad for an urban vibe, and nowhere as comfortable.

Regardless, I continue to hail yellow cabs, except in the New York boroughs and some Manhattan nabes where the main option is car-service vehicles. When I lived uptown I used car services operated by Dominicans, which carried the perk of a merengue soundtrack. By then there were also many yellow-cab drivers from Haiti and from African countries who politely turned down their volume when what they saw as a white guy in a suit as their passenger, until I insisted they cranked up the sound. Riding through New York to the beat of Afropop, now that was a treat.

I imagine such music can be found in Uber, but I still choose taxis, maybe because they are in danger of extinction and they feed my nostalgia for urban life in the past century. Maybe because it was the only form of transportation Federico García Lorca ever took, even in Vermont. Most likely because I associate them with my marvelous years in New York. In Havana, where there are no yellow cabs, I have used a car service based at the Riviera Hotel that only uses Mercedes. And I abhor the almendrones -- vintage American cars -- that tourists love to ride in. Shit, I rode in and drove such clunkers -- in the States -- because they were all my family could afford. Mercedes-Benz for this Cuban, thank you.

The other big postmodern phenom is Airbnb. This I have used for strictly practical reasons, like no hotels at my destination and/or no money for hotel rates. All things being equal, however, I'd rather stay in a hotel, preferably a good one. My residence fantasy is not a Tuscan villa but a penthouse suite in an elegant hotel in one of the world's great cities. 

Hotel rooms get daily cleaning and nightly turn-down service, there's usually a decent or even great restaurant, a bar where there's a party, flat screen TV with a choice of recent movies, mini-bar and, of course, room service, one of the great achievements of civilization. Great hotels are a marvel. I'm partial to the luxury hotels of Mexico City, where the service is outstanding, surpassing anything I've experienced in the US, but also an inexpensive but beautiful inn in Cuernavaca where the patio was a well tended tropical jungle.

These are not postmodern experiences, though I imagine Arthur Rimbaud in his impecunious youth might have found them absolument moderne. Will the postmodern gig economy wash away such pleasures as taxis and hotels? Peut-être. Climate change may wash away the land traversed by taxis and where fine hotels stand. But neither postmodernism nor global warming will make that much difference while I'm still around. Young people already prefer Uber, and for all I know Airbnb. Tant pis!

Too old to sail a drunken boat, I mostly stay home, read what gives me pleasure and write what I hope gives you some.

And that's a fact

"Where is the data?", my colleague asked at the faculty meeting where we were discussing a way to measure how well we taught our students. He was a member of a psychology department where they were all behaviorists; they had their own building where they conducted experiments on monkeys, that sort of thing. Naturally, for behaviorists the only way to discuss anything could only be based on hard data.

Not everyone was like them at our liberal arts college. Certainly those of us in languages and literature weren't. Nor the historians, and least of all the teachers of art, some of whom were artists. It was one such artist who, during a presentation of her own paintings, invoked Carl Jung, which provoked one of the psychology profs in the audience to jump up and practically scream in objection. It took a level-headed historian in the room to explain that Jung, whose theories were so much mumbo-jumbo to a behaviorist, had a different place in art studies than in the discipline of psychology. The collective unconscious was not about the data,

We were a fairly old-fashioned school, yet to be hit by the winds of critical theory blowing from France that were taking sectors of academia in places like Yale by storm. Theory, as it was simply called, was a groove (I use the word deliberately because much fed on the turmoil of the sixties) that took its building blocks from anthropology, linguistics (and its correlative, semiotics), psychoanalysis (but not Jung), literary criticism, and certain aspects of Marxism and the thought of Frederic Nietzsche. It flourished in France, where the café society philosophes like Sartre were losing their esteem. And though it wasn't data-crazy like American behaviorism, there was something hard-edged about its attitude. Intellectual punk rock with a French accent.

It found fertile ground in American academia, where a generation of scholars (mine) was hungry for something that challenged the established order. I resisted its siren call, mostly because I truly wasn't fit for academia, even in punk-rock guise, but I succumbed to it briefly when I imagined myself a film studies guy -- this stuff was big in film studies. But that's another story. What's relevant about this wave (Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Umberto Eco, to name a few) is that they suggested, or even said, that there was no such thing as facts, at least nothing intellectually verifiable. Or as I myself put it in something I wrote when I was under their influence, reality is not available.

In our days of alt-facts, some analysts have fingered the postmodern theorists -- another name for this movement -- as undermining the faith in facts that liberals see crumbling under siege by the alt-right. Frankly, I'm not sure academic mind-games had that much weight on public thought, though I confess that, possibly still under the spell of those dastardly French thinkers, I too question the fact-ness of facts. For one, where is the data? If there's something I learned in academia is that for every peer-reviewed way of looking at things there's a completely opposite peer-reviewed perspective. Academia is full of such warring camps, which make the pastoral Ivy-covered campuses bloody battlegrounds.

Still, there's a difference between passionate attachments to schools of thought and the chicanery of falsification for political gain. Not everyone is capable of discernment. I am not trained to analyze primary sources in important areas, like climate change. But I am educated enough to understand that it makes sense and that those trained minds who tell me about it are on the right track. I am willing to accept that there could be errors in the prognostications of such change, but the scientific method has checks and balances that reassure me a huge error is unlikely. Reality may not be available, but what's available is good enough for me.

In a way I'm trusting my instincts, as all sentient creatures do. And I temper that trust with skepticism, fortunately an inborn trait. I do my best. We all do. Except those who do their worst. We all believe in something (in the way she moves), and I believe in George Harrison.

Beware of greedy leaders/They take you where you should not go.

Our Essays, Ourselves

Que yo les cuente mis penas/me piden de tarde en tarde

A recent New Yorker piece tells me the personal essay is over. It's the politics, stupid. It seems that with the sound and fury released by the Trump presidency, two words that I never thought I'd see linked, never mind by me, we're not in the mood for navel gazing. So gone, or at least disappearing, are those embarrassing writings about, say, vaginas -- though their Monologues are still alive and well -- because, yes, most of the perps of this allegedly dying genre are women. Chick lit at the tipping point.

It's troubling, to say the least, to learn, particularly from such an august publication where journalism is presented as essays, that a genre one is cultivating, nay, barely getting started with, is like so over. And that it belongs to a gender I have no intention of transitioning toward, though all my life I've cozied up to it, but here I am getting personal in my essay. No, I don't write about a vagina I don't have, though I do write about all the ones I've loved before (who now are someone else's grandmas). But I have written about my penis, though I hope there's more to it than that, in a very personal book-size essay titled Pretty to Think So: Eros and Prostate Cancer, to be published by Books & Books Press, hopefully next year. Dick lit.

My initial problem with the New Yorker's diagnosis lies in the words "personal essay." I thought the essay was personal by definition. Otherwise, it's something else, like reportage or instruction manual or peer-reviewed article. Aren't the essais of Miguel de Montaña, as an academic Spaniard I knew called the Frenchman because he had a Spanish mother, aren't these beginnings of the genre personal? I think what's meant by "personal essay", in the New Yorker article and elsewhere, is the too-personal essay. Says who? Why, the Puritan ethic, of course. The same one that brought us the phrase, applicable to the genre, of "too much information." As if TMI weren't  the only kind worth sharing, the only kind we hunger for, what piques our curiosity. But "too much" is anathema to the Puritan ethic, and its esthetic derivatives, like minimalism.

But my objections to the label aside, why write personal? Why navel gaze? (I enjoy gazing not at my own navel but the ones in the middle of comely bodies, and once again I'm getting personal and disclosing TMI.) I ask myself that when I write, troubled as I am by the insecurities and unease that haunt practically anyone who writes. I could reach for the hootch, in the Great American Writer tradition, but it doesn't agree with me. Or for the needle and the damage done. Instead, I come up with a justification that I hope, but never really know, is not a rationalization. The human condition.

I guess, though I have no way of knowing for certain, that we humans go through more or less the same shit. I have a way of gazing at it in public: writing. And perhaps someone out there, the reader, will recognize the commonality of our shit and say, oh shit, that's what I go through, let's see what this guy has to say about it. That's it. Cursed by extreme introspection, which in everyday life is called self-absorption and is the doom of relationships, I can interrogate myself. Maybe the reader, a healthier specimen, doesn't do that as easily (compulsively, obsessively), and I serve as a ventriloquist's dummy for his less accesible self-perusal. Good essays, like those of Phillip Lopate or Richard Rodriguez, do that. Mine? I'm trying.

Women who write about their vaginas have vaginas in common with other women. I wrote a book about prostate cancer (not a self-help or even vaguely inspiring book): all men have prostates and the fragile sexual organs and even more fragile egos linked to them. Many men get prostate cancer -- second cancer killer of American men. And learning you have it and deciding what to do about it and then living with what you've done magnifies that fragility that's linked to our sexuality. Was I self-indulgent in dwelling on my own woes? Is it a First World problem? Well, death is an All World problem. And consciousness of our impending death is one of the things, perhaps the thing, that makes us human.

So I write in this dying genre. As I lay (and walk and talk and even get laid) dying. Like you, reader, mon semblable, m . . . oh you know.

A Tale of Two Cities

¿Serán de La Habana?/¿Serán de Santiago? 

"You all talk like Negroes", she told me. I was around 12, she maybe three years older. She had come from Santiago to see a medical specialist in Havana for some kind of back problem, a curvature that, as far as I could see, only accented the natural curves of her already very Cuban figure. I was smitten but obviously had no chance -- with her or with anyone. She was staying with us: our families were friends. And we were having a good natured argument about regional accents.

"You speak in singsong", I said, repeating what we habaneros said about orientales, the people from Oriente province, where Santiago de Cuba is the capital. "No", she argued. "It's you habaneros who speak in singsong. And you all talk like Negroes."

And she illustrated this by pronouncing the word for coal, carbón, with all its vowels and consonants. "In Havana you say 'cahb'n'." She had a point: that's how we said it. And, yes, that's how black Cubans spoke, at least on the street. Had we engaged in this debate many years later, I would've riposted a mucha honra -- I'm honored to sound black. But we were children in the mid 1950s, soaked in racism, a word I did not even know. I was mortified.

In retrospect, and leaving aside the old Havana/Santiago rivalry, as old as the two old cities, I think it's not that we habaneros sound black, it's that we sound street. I would've been far more mortified if she had told me I sounded fisto -- pretentiously refined. Even the most refined of habaneros, poet and novelist José Lezama Lima, spoke with a marked Havana accent, as I discovered once when I heard a recording of the writer reading from his masterwork Paradiso. His famously convoluted language, practically lifted from the Spanish Baroque, and his unabashed high-culture references almost shocked me coming from the lips of someone who spoke so. . . so. . . so Havana!

Habaneros of all backgrounds shy from refined diction. Well, not all. There is a Havana accent that I call mid-century theater and I associate it with thespians of that era. I have known Havana folk, mostly female, who spoke like that, and, indeed, some of them had been on stage. It's very affected, and any male who used it would be subjected to our macho homophobia. 

Otherwise, we tend to speak plain, which in the estimation of my santiaguera early object of desire meant we all talk black. We're not alone. Contemporary American speech is laced with expressions that come from black culture, and many a white kid, steeped in nothing but rap and hip hop, will try to sound that way, down to the common use of "nigger" among friends.

Habaneros will say "cahb'n", except there's not much reason to do so -- back when the young santiaguera used it as an example, coal stoves were still common in Cuban kitchens. What we do use are expressions that are less than refined. I knew the matriarch of a high-society family, a true grand dame, who addressed others with the repeated use of tú, which in this context meant something like the American "yo'." Knowing her status -- a classically trained pianist, a member of the most exclusive Havana clubs, an expert golfer -- was as startling as hearing Lezama read his prose with a marked Havana accent.

There's a flip side to this demotic speech. Sure, we all sound or try to sound like the salt of the earth, as long as that salt is straight. I already noted how that stagey accent would identify a male as gay and open him to homophobic ridicule. Lezama, who was gay, did not use it, though I think his speech was what came naturally. Or maybe his language was already so contrived that to speak it with affectation would be far too much.

As for the Havana/Santiago dialectic, it must be noted that Fidel spoke like the oriental that he was, and it is said that he had no love for Havana. He's gone, so no matter. The young woman who argued with me about who spoke in singsong grew old, as I did, and continued to be a family friend -- in Miami, of course. A few years ago my mom told me that she'd told her she had a crush on me back in the day. I'll be damned! My feelings were reciprocated and I was clueless -- though even if I'd been a cool kid, which I wasn't, how much clue can you have at 12? Now you tell me!, I said to my mother.

I didn't pursue anything. Some things are better left as memories. But if I could travel in a time machine to the day of that argument, what I'd like to say is, not that I'm proud to sound black and street, if I ever sounded that way, which I doubt. But that I found the santiaguero singsong, particularly hers, irresistibly charming.

A man who leads a life of danger

Whenever I touched on the issue of bilingualism in The Sun-Sentinel, the excellent and friendly Ft Lauderdale daily, a deluge of troubled missives and phone calls would follow. Broward County was where the notorious "Anglo flight" from the encroaching Latinamericanness of Miami headed some decades ago. And the Anglos -- in the literal sense of English-speakers -- were touchy. Boy, were they.

Whenever I wrote about just about anything in The Miami Herald, the also excellent but far less friendly daily where I worked later, a deluge of online comments -- by then we were fully into the digital age -- would follow that quickly degenerated into name-calling. And not just across the Anglo/Latino divide. Miami was far more contentious than Ft Lauderdale, perhaps because it was more urban, but mostly because it was, I must admit, more Latin American. The insult hurling took place among Latin Americans of various nationalities who were pissed off at Cubans. And among Cubans themselves who were, typically, pissed off at each other.

Unlike in the city north of Miami, where I tried to reason with my touchy non-Latino readers, in Miami itself I stayed out of the fray. My editors wanted me to exercise my privilege to delete the abusive comments, but I insisted that these folk came from countries, including my native Cuba, where freedom of speech was curtailed and I didn't have the heart to censor them. In the end, my editors did the censoring themselves.

We live in contentious times. I no longer write for dailies, though I read them online. But I don't follow the comments. I'm disturbed enough by the news, I imagine my Miami compatriots and fellow Latinos are still yelling at each other online, which I think is less harmful than firing squads and torture dungeons. On Facebook I tend to unfollow -- never unfriend since that would be unfriendly -- those who rant, either on the right or the left. But even those who don't are up in arms and I wonder if I should just get out of social media. Then again I wonder if I should just stop reading the news and devote myself to literature and hunting butterflies, like Nabokov (though literature is not nice, I know, killing and pinning butterflies seems just plain nasty).

Contentiousness is not with me. Probably old age, complicated treatments that keep old age keeping on, and simply the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks/that flesh is heir to. Though more probably the fact that contentiousness doesn't sit well on me. Oh, I've been contentious all right, but when I recall those incidents I am profoundly embarrassed by what a rogue and peasant slave [was] I!, to stay with the Dane. What a fool!

Am I then meek and humble like Assisi's Francesco? Hardly. More battered than saintly. St Francis was a reformer by lifestyle and, therefore, example. But he was a conservative with no desire to challenge anything or anyone. That came later at the hand of more contentious types, like Martin Luther. I don't challenge, but I'm no conservative. Until recently, Papal arrogance irked me. As does the arrogance of secular power. But reform and Reformation and revolution have a way of assuming arrogance. My suspicion is that it was always there, among the reformers and rebels. Perhaps it's congenital. And perhaps those who have the arrogance-of-power gene are the ones who gravitate toward reform or revolution, and those who don't, like the sweet Francesco, are happy to serve the Popes of this world, religious or secular, as long as they can pursue poverty and stigmata.

We live in the times of Counter-Reformation. La Contrareforma, a Spanish invention. A contrarreformista has taken the reins of this country -- a sloppy metaphor since he never took Stagecoach Driver's Ed -- and others are poised to do likewise abroad. In the Arab world the Reformation was so short-lived, a mere season, that it's likely to be forgotten, while the Counter-Reformation has been swift and merciless. And increasingly, other entities rage. Not hard to imagine a sci-fi scenario of corporations, crime cartels and savage theocracies waging apocalyptic war. Not to mention dynasties, that family value the Enlightenment supposedly ended and now it seems it's the Enlightenment that ended.

Should I pray for stigmata? Or would that be an act of rebellion, of contentiousness? I no longer live in South Florida, land of inter and intra ethnic name-calling, of dueling languages. I live among the rank and file of the Contrareforma. I go about incognito. Secret Agent Man. Nonviolent old ronin. Filling insurance forms in doctors' waiting rooms, under the English translation of my baptismal name, which for complicated reasons I've explained elsewhere is the one in my Social Security card. They've given me a number/and taken away my name.

Damned good coffee

This morning I pressed the same button twice on the espresso machine by mistake and the water kept running into a very watered down brew. My sister, who as she does every morning came from her house next door to have a buchito (sip) of espresso, called it zambumbia, but she drank it anyway. I turned my eyes up and apologized to my father's spirit for having committed such a crime.

Like most, probably all, Cubans, dad had very strict notions about coffee. It had to be very strong (and loaded with sugar); anything else was zambumbia and basically undrinkable. In Cuba the word originally named water sweetened with sugar syrup, and according to historians it was given to slaves to bolster their energy. On Sundays the drink was fortified with aguardiente -- sugarcane eau de vie -- for the slaves' partying. This spiked zambumbia was probably an ancestor of the mojito.

Mutatis mutandi, the sugar-water's name got applied to watered-down coffee. At least it was where my father came from, a sleepy town in the middle of sugarcane country. Its two plosive b's allow the speaker to exaggerate the bombast, laced with scorn. That's how my father pronounced it. For scorn he definitely felt. And he just wouldn't drink it.

Curiously, he'd drink American coffee. Some aspects of American life fascinated dad in our first trip to the US -- Miami in the 50's. Two of them were Walgreens drugstores, which unlike Cuban pharmacies were all-night department stores with a coffee shop; and American coffee, which he believed was so weak that it could not rob him of sleep, so he'd drink it at night at a Walgreens counter before going to our hotel to sleep. Soundly.

He never thought of this radically watered-down coffee as zambumbia. It was a whole other species, and from the start he'd call it "coffee" even when speaking Spanish, while the Cuban version, the kind that could be ruined if it became the dreaded zambumbia, was always café. Many years later when he and my mom visited New Orleans they sampled the coffee at the Cafe du Monde and didn't like it, though I think it was my mom who most objected to the chicory in the brew.

Cuban coffee is nothing but sweetened espresso. Some will add sugar to the ground coffee before brewing, which is possibly more authentic. And, of course, it wasn't always espresso. By the time I was old enough to have it, usually with my dad, at Havana's sidewalk coffee stands, it was made by big Italian machines. At home and outside the city however, coffee was brewed in cloth bags. Eventually home devices were introduced and Cubans became as hooked on the stacked Bialetti coffeemakers as Italians -- today available in every Miami bodega. Trouble is that by then Cubans were also hooked on the crema, the coffee foam created by those powerful commercial machines. We call it espumita and this is how it's made at home.

You watch the little Bialetti on the stove until the first few drops slip out of the upright spout. Immediately, you pour those drops, and only those drops, in a cup with the sugar you want for the coffee, and you beat it all vigorously with a spoon until a thick fudge has formed. By then all the coffee has been brewed, so you pour that into the cup. Presto! A head of foam rises to the top. 

Today many home espresso machines have enough pressure to create foam -- and better tasting coffee. But they tend to be pricey. I remember wandering through a gourmet shop once and watching the demonstration of an $1,800 Italian machine that ground the beans, made the coffee and disposed of the grounds. This was years ago, so I imagine it'd cost more now. I sampled the espresso it made and, yes, it had a head of crema and tasted good. But at that price I'd expect it to teach me Italian and read me choice passages from Dante or project Antonioni films on the wall.

The first espresso maker my family owned was small but heavy, made of stainless steel, and it brewed decent coffee, but no espumita. We bought it at Havana's Sears and brought it with us to the States. We used it for years. When I got married my parents gave it to me and I used it for years. I don't know what became of it. It was certainly indestructible. Since then I've gone through many. These days I use one that takes pods, a truly guilty pleasure because the pods are expensive, I feel like a sloth for skipping the work of filling a coffeemaker with ground coffee (never ground my own), and the company that makes it is very politically and ecologically incorrect (you know which one).

But it makes crema/espumita. Possibly there's a circle in the inferno for my sins that the divine Tosco che per la  città del foco went around chatting up the damned could not have foreseen. But espresso is one of my addictions. And sloth is another.

¿Y tú cómo estás? Encantado de la vida

I saw Peter O'Toole, already aged but gorgeous in a bespoke suit, on Charlie Rose once. The actor had recently recovered from a serious medical episode, but when asked about it he dismissed it in a tone that clearly said, it's distasteful to talk about one's health issues in public. I admired his display of impeccable manners as much as I admired his clothes, and swore I'd be like him when my time inevitably came -- bad health, not a turn with Charlie Rose.

I'm about to break my vow. Done it already, really, for I have written a book-length manuscript that's waiting to be published about my experience with prostate cancer. I justified this breach of taste by telling myself that a) it would do a world of good to prostate cancer patients and their loved ones to read an honest (balls out, in fact) account of the experience, and b) it's really a big sexual romp so it can be read as porn, a genre that needs no justification. But I don't think I have anything instructive left to say, and if you're looking for salacious writing here, click on something else.

First, a recap, truly boring so I'll rush through it. I've had surgery, radiation, hormone therapy (a misnomer, for that sounds like you get more, while, in fact, you get it taken away), acupuncture and Chinese medication, three newfangled treatments with sci-fi names, more radiation to shrink metastasis, a shift toward constant rather than intermittent ball-busting and penis-shrinking hormone treatment, and chemotherapy.

How am I doing? Pretty damn good. Except for impotence, chemical castration, fatigue and nausea. I don't count hair loss because though there's no baldness in my family I really like my shaved head, but I'm a sucker for badassery. I'm old now and these vicissitudes and more were likely to start visiting me anyway. Besides, prostate cancer, second cancer killer of American men -- first is lung cancer -- is, paradoxically, cancer lite. Which doesn't mean it won't kill me.

It boils down to very slow growth, which gives one a chance to take action: all I listed above. It does, however, require constant monitoring, and that I do. Given to the obsessive self-awareness of a Javier Marías narrator, I was born to monitor myself. And so I do. I have come to realize that, like the nuns in Pedro Almodóvar's Dark Habits, I've devoted my life to "cultivating my personality." And in this late, though I'm still hoping not last, phase, I don't cultivate. I curate myself. And not just my personality, but all of me, mostly my body.

Right now, to start in medias res, I am undergoing the side effects of chemotherapy from two days ago. That means fatigue to the point of inertia, accompanied by loss of willpower -- not that I had much to begin with. And nausea. Sartrean? No. Just yucky. Appetite is gone and with it the desire or even the ability to cook, my big joy. So it's instant noodle soup for dinner, or even breakfast cereal.

It only lasts a few days at a time, this malaise. Thanks to it I've gone down in weight to what I consider my personal best, though it's a hell of a way to achieve it. Fatigue discourages exercise -- I was about to write "prevents" but I do have to take some responsibility. Since what results from all of this is a slim flabbiness, I'm not happy about it. I take steps to remedy it, but that willpower issue . . . 

Do I enjoy curating myself? God (and any love partner I've had in this long life) knows I am self-absorbed under any circumstances. Now just more so. Could I take a lesson from my late idol Peter O'Toole and not dwell on my infirmities? I don't know. I concur with what I took to be his views on the matter when he dismissed Charlie Rose's question about his health. A gentleman doesn't talk about such things. I suppose I am no gentleman, for here, dear patient reader, I have inflicted my rumination about myself on your self. My most heartfelt, no, abject, apologies. 

Sabor a mí

I just had a whore's lunch, or so I've been told it is. Arroz con huevos fritos. In another place and time it was fast food, the simplest item of the Cuban menu, so basic that Cuban restaurants and coffee shops seldom carry it: it's too home-cooking. You make white rice, which every Cuban cook can do blindfolded, and you fry some eggs in semi-deep fat, burn them, as they say since Spanish food became trendy, and mount them on the rice. That's it. Well, no, you accompany the dish with a side of maduros, sautéed ripe plantains, and maduros cook quickly. The point of this Cuban a la puttanesca is you can make it between customers.

There are few things Cubans love more than this simple dish. Its austerity connects it with a Spanish favorite, fried eggs over a bed of fried potatoes. When I met the great American writer of Spanish cookbooks, the late Penelope Casas, she and her husband told me that while researching one of her books they asked Spanish chefs and restaurateurs what was their favorite dish. Invariably they said fried eggs with fried potatoes, something their mothers made, sometimes with a side of chorizo. My Spanish/Cuban identity makes me waver between the criollo and peninsular dishes, and while my palate usually gravitates toward Spain -- I love those Spanish spuds, sliced in thin rounds and fried in olive oil -- nostalgia drives me toward arroz con huevos fritos.

We Cubans don't top dishes with fried eggs, what's called a caballo (on horseback), as often as other Latin Americans, but a fried egg over picadillo and white rice is irresistible. Picadillo means hash, and ours is ground meat -- usually beef, but veal is divine, and some cooks add a bit of ground ham to the beef -- cooked in a sofrito, plus usually olives, capers and raisins. All over the Hispanic world this is a favorite filling for empanadas and millefeuille pastelitos, one of the delights of my childhood. However, Cubans often skip the pastry and serve the picadillo over rice. Fried egg is optional, while other options include adding baby peas -- Cubans are hooked on Le Sueur -- and diced carrots, or small potato cubes fried. The latter stretches the dish but it's also quite delicious. No matter what version, it's always served over white rice,

Arroz con picadillo and arroz con huevos fritos are nearly always accompanied by maduros, as is the classic arroz con pollo, a fancier Sunday dish. Fried dishes go with tostones, twice fried green plantains, and with anything accompanied by moros y cristianos -- black beans cooked with the rice, in the style of West Indian rice and peas. Roast pork, usually served with frijoles negros, calls for yuca (cassava) con mojo. The Cuban menu pairs other dishes with different tubers: boniato, ñame, malanga. As with other culinary traditions, these pairings are perfectly matched.

Cuban dishes echo through the Caribbean Basin and the rest of Latin America. A Brazilian feijoada tastes very much like Cuban frijoles negros, though with the addition of a variety of meats. And in fact, according to the late Nitza Villapol, old frijoles negros recipes included meats, just as in Brazil. Our neighbors Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic offer dishes very similar to Cuba's. A Puerto Rican asopao de pollo is like a very wet arroz con pollo, for example. And no one makes better tostones than Dominicans. Theirs are like the best fries, crunchy throughout, no mealiness in the middle.

The criollo menus are basically cuisine paysanne, even if some of the more elaborate dishes are served on special occasions. There is a repetitiveness to them that I imagine can bore, such as the ubiquitous sofrito in Cuban dishes. But aside from the nostalgia factor for those of us away from home, there's something seductive about the flavors, Something that encourages second helpings and the languor that suggests a siesta. What else it suggests on a steamy tropical afternoon is something that has to be tasted.