I always lived with rationing in Cuba – I was born in 1973. We used the term “the three musketeers” to mean rice, chicharos [split peas] and eggs, although at one point eggs disappeared completely.
I had two rabbits as pets and I arrived home from school one day and there was that smell I’d almost forgotten, of meat. Then I realised that Mamá had roasted my pets and I cried a lot. My mother pressed us to eat them and we all did. The rabbits tasted very good, obviously – I was a kid and I sort of got distracted. I was very sad, but I ate.
The essential food on the ration coupon was rice. A meal might be rice with beans, rice with plantain, rice with sugar water, rice with egg and sometimes rice with meat. But rice, rice, rice. And sugar, which the country grows a lot of. The motto at the time was: “Eat sugar in order to grow.” Sometimes, during the scarcity of the Special Period [1991-2000], a meal might be just plain bread covered with sugar. I became addicted to sugar.
During meals at ballet school I’d keep one eye on those ballerinas who wanted to be thinner, because they didn’t always finish their meals. Sometimes we’d circle around them like starving hyenas. Nowadays my wife, Charlotte, says I eat far too quickly and suggests it’s rooted in my past. So I’ll tell myself: “Calm down, Carlos. This food is not going to run away.”
Around age 10, I tasted chocolate for the first time. We didn’t have chocolate at home and there was nowhere in Los Pinos [a suburb of Havana] to get it. But it had taken on a very special appeal. A teacher gave me a small bar and I remember going home, sitting with my sister and cutting each piece of chocolate into four. Then each small square we made even smaller.
My father gave food to the saints in his shrine; food we could have eaten. He sometimes cooked for us, but it was like a chemical experiment. It was bad news, pretty much unbearable. We’d even pray Father wouldn’t cook. But Mamá got ill and went to hospital for quite a while. So for months Dad made terrible meals.
I wanted to be a footballer. I played truant one week out of four and was thrown out of the school in Havana. At 13 I was sent to a boarding school in another city. Each Wednesday the students’ parents could visit, bringing homemade food for them, but my parents never visited. It was very hard seeing other students eating homemade food as well as that from the state’s centre for school food distribution. But sometimes they’d share with me some really yummy steak. It would tide me over until Friday, when I had a pass to stay with my older half-brother in Pinar del Rio. His mother made good but very limited food. It just wasn’t enough and we fought over it.
I felt starving after dancing – each ballet class was one and a half hours. In fact, I felt constant hunger. Breakfast was often a toasted bread roll which we’d put into milk and add sugar. I’d try and join the lunch queue – of 300 students – a second time in the hope that someone wouldn’t say: “Hey Carlos, you’ve eaten already!” I’d reply: “No, no. It wasn’t me.” I always had that argument.
I practically lived in Chinatown when I was with the Royal Ballet in London. Yes, you have Indian food which is amazing, and I love a thin-crust pizza in an Italian, but I was most often eating Chinese. I had a lot of peking duck – with rice obviously. And there was a really nice Cuban restaurant in Kensington High Street, which was very popular but is sadly not there any more, where you could have pork crackling and all kinds of lovely tamales.
I take porridge to Cuba for me to eat, and all sorts of grains and fruits as fuel and energy. As presents I take chocolates. When it was recommended to me that I needed to travel to see my mother [because she was very ill], it was quite sad because I spoke to her on the phone and asked, “What do you want me to bring?” She replied: “A lasagne.” So, I flew from London with a lasagne but when I got there she was dead.
The Acosta Dance Company eats a free lunch, everyone sitting down together in a tiny room at 1pm. It’s important we see ourselves as a collective and have good vibes for each other but that we can disconnect from dancing and each of us bring their own life and its thoughts and problems to the table. I think it enhances the dance by breaking from it for food together.
We have a seven-year-old and identical twins who are three. Twins can be 10 times the work. When my wife was pregnant with the twins she suffered twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. Now they eat the same foods but want them at different times or in different combinations, based on one being sick or on lots of individual growing and appetite. From one meal to another, one of them wants the toast and the other the fruit. I personally wasn’t very good with salads, growing up. But across any week you would see our children happily eating salads. And carrots, broccoli and cucumber. It’s wonderful to see.
My favourite things
Food
I first ate sushi in Houston, when I moved there from Cuba to join the ballet company. I thought, “What’s all this about? Raw fish – how terrible.” But by the third time I was absolutely hooked.
Drink
A 15-year-old dark rum; a good Chilean merlot; a mojito.
Restaurant
The River House in Frome for breakfast; the Smokehouse or Roka in London for dinner; the Talbot Inn in Frome for Sunday roast. In Havana, you can’t beat La Guardia for atmosphere and food.
Dish
I haven’t mastered the art of cooking. I don’t cook for myself. If pushed by someone else, I’d make them scrambled egg, rice and beans. Or a pasta – spaghetti with onions, tomato sauce and parmesan cheese on top and there you go.
Dance Consortium’s spring tour of Acosta Danza’s Evolution opens at the Mayflower Theatre, Southampton on 3 March; danceconsortium.com
