Andrew Peña plays a newly discovered home video of his grandmother he never met cooking Picadillo. The classic Cuban cuisine entails a savory venture of history that explodes with flavoring green peppers, ground beef and spices. It’s the first dish Peña made on his journey to reconnect with Cuban culture, which he had lost through time and Americanization.
In the United States, Cubans make up the fourth-largest population of Latine cultures with a total of 2.4 million, as of 2021, according to Pew Research. Less than 1% of Cubans reside in California, according to a 2020 Census. In Los Angeles County, there are over 24,000 restaurants and less than 30 of them are Cuban restaurants, a disparity that Peña has felt when reconnecting with his culture.
“There isn’t a Cuban community at school”
— Andrew Peña.
“I rarely see places while at USC, besides Porto’s, but it’s hard to find a Cuban restaurant in L.A.,” Peña, 21-years-old, said. “I guess there isn’t a demand, but I am cooking dishes myself so at least I have that.”
Peña is a first-generation Cuban and a senior in astronomical engineering at USC. He didn’t learn Spanish or much about his culture growing up, so now he is taking charge of discovering what it means to be Cuban through food.
As families come to America, they face pressure to assimilate into American culture. For Peña, his family quickly worked on becoming more American as soon as they stepped on U.S. soil.
“My dad is the side that’s Cuban, but he didn’t speak Spanish or cook very much,” Peña said. “But my dad and I since 2019 have been trying to connect. We will go to Cuban restaurants whenever there is a celebration and it’s something that we have started doing more, like a tradition.”
Now, a two-decade-old home movie that his father, Angel, made of his mother cooking will be another bridge for Peña to get closer to his Cuban culture.
Angel Peña rewatches his mother cooking after her passing two decades ago with tears in his eyes.
The struggle to connect with Cuba as a new generation
Food helps us move and energizes our bodies, but it is also more than that. The meals we make bring connections to those who taught us and those who taught them. There is a link to our family's and ancestors' stories found in each meal; for families like the Peña’s, it is a link to Cuba.
Even though Peña’s father, Angel, was born in Cuba and lived there until he was 8 years old, it was difficult for him to connect with his culture. Growing up in America, Angel had to “adapt” to the new land and its traditions, but when his son began to cook it was an invitation back to his lineage.
“When I have Cuban food, it’s just kind of like looking at an old movie It brings back a lot of memories. And from the food, just the smells, it triggers a lot of sensations that I remember,” Angel said. “When Andrew began to cook, it just opened the door for me to look in the past and especially for the video I took of my mother cooking before she died.”
After working together on the dish, Picadillo, the two enjoy their work.
Andrew views the wall of spices, searching for Oregano for his Cuban dish.
On the next step of adding Onions to the dish, Andrew is one step closer to a savory dish.
Cutting the rest of the ingredients, Andrew shows his technique to cutting.
She was weakened by frontotemporal degeneration, a disease that causes progressive nerve loss, behavioral changes and decline of motor functions. Before she died, Angel wanted to capture her one last time. On July 7, 2001, Angel filmed his mother cooking his favorite dish, Picadillo, just one year before she passed away.
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“It’s something I grew up with and I just recall that I’d be tired from school and coming home I’d smell the food and it would just bring me back to life,” Angel said. “I want to try to make it myself for my family. It may be different, but that’s the magic of Cuban food - everybody adds a little bit of their touch.”
However, for generations that didn’t get to experience Cuba, it can be difficult to connect with the culture, a trend for many Latino and Hispanic cultures that have generations in America. In a 2020 study by Pew Research, it was discovered that the terms Latinos use to identify themselves change with more identifying as American throughout each generation.
Connecting to culture
Connecting to one culture is different for many first- and second-generation Latinos who live in America. When growing up in the U.S., it can be difficult to maintain a relationship with Cuban culture, especially when Cubans represent about 4% of Latinos in America. But with food, it is a physical thing that showcases culture and history that helps with such struggles.
Tere Revell speaks on the food and tradition
“Food is a representation of the culture, it is part of the oral traditions,” Sara Portnoy, a professor of Latinx Food Studies at the Univeristy of Southern California, “It’s part of the culture that gets passed down and preserved and though many people in the U.S. coming from their country don’t do [cook] everything the same, it’s still a form of connection to one’s culture.”
Portnoy has worked on “Abuelita’s Kitchen,” a documentary film focused on immigrant women sharing their Mexican culture through food recipes. One abuelita who has a story to tell from Cuba uses her food to bring her family together.
For Tere Revel food is her bridge to Cuba. Revel serves her family her traditional Ropa Vieja, a dish of shredded beef slowly cooked with onions, tomato sauce and an array of spices accompanied by black beans and white rice. It is the same one she serves every Christmas Eve, a tradition that connects her to her culture and aims to pass it on.
Coming from Cuba at 9 years old, Revel's memories of Cuba still move her.
“It was a way of socializing because food is always involved,” Revel said. “I don’t know why, but we don’t come together as a family to just chat and drink coffee, we get together to eat and there is some sense of home I feel when I cook a meal and it brings everyone together.”
Arriving in Florida at the age of 9, Revel came through by “Operation Peter Pan,” a program in 1960 in which the United States sent minors from Cuba to different parts of the country. It was for those parents who feared Fidel Castro and the Communist Party. Being alone and going to school for about a year, she reunited with her mother, but life would still bring obstacles.
“All I had was Cuban food made by my grandma when they came to America,” Revel said. “At one point, a refugee center in Florida would give us supplies and one was meat-like spam that my parents would make into Croquettes” Revel said, adding that though the ingredients were not the same from Cuba, it was still the taste of her home that she missed.
Food inspires memories
Currently, new generations of Latinos struggle with identity, according to a Pew Research report, and a big tie for them includes language. It showed that only 6% of second-generation Latinos are Spanish-dominant speaking, while a 2023 study found that only 34% of 3rd generation Latinos can hold a conversation in Spanish.
If a Cuban individual is unable to speak Spanish or know what it was like to live in Cuba, food helps bridge the gap between disconnection and connection with culture.
“The food, it’s just so much flavor, it just keeps you connected,” said Joevany Gonzalez, co-owner of the restaurant The Cuban Hut in Temecula, California. “When we make the food, it’s with love. Growing up in Miami, my parents had a restaurant and people were always coming in and out and it was like a kitchen and all these customers were family.”
Gonzalez is a first-generation Cuban, born in 1984 in Miami, Florida, then when he was 14 his family moved to Pennsylvania. For Gonzalez, it was both a great and sad time, since there weren’t many Cubans it was lonely, but it was nice sharing their culture with new people.
“Even though the majority of our neighborhood was white, they were nice, teaching us different things like shooting and camping, and they loved my mom's cooking,” Gonzalez said. “ In that insane time growing up, my mom's cooking helped me maintain my love for my culture, being a dominantly white area, it was nice to come home and smell my years in Miami.”
Food can help bring memories, love, and appreciation for a culture when there is nothing else that can.
“Language is usually the first thing that is lost through generations, but food traditions tend to be the last thing,” Portnoy said. “ You can be a fifth, sixth generation Latino American and still go to eat tamales for Christmas or make Ropa Vieja on holiday, which still ties generations together.”
