My New Charcoal Stove
HAVANA TIMES – I don’t remember feeling as much joy when I bought my liquefied-gas stove as I do with this charcoal one, which I just bought for 3,000 pesos (almost the equivalent to a monthly minimum wage). It looks like a toy, but it will give me the pleasure of making coffee for my friends when they visit, and of making myself some linden tea when I feel like relaxing, or some corn fritters, which I love with lots of spicy mojo, vinegar, and salt.
This latest Cuban invention, which I found in my neighborhood, is made by welding together two pot lids from the “Reina” electric multi-cookers, the ones the dictatorship sold us under the now-defunct Energy Revolution program.
My new stove has short little legs, so you can put it just about anywhere, large or small, on a little table or even on the floor. And it has another lid made of the same steel material to catch the ashes.
My aunt explained to me how this little stove works. First you put in some paper, then a small plastic bag (which serves as fuel), and place the larger pieces of charcoal around the sides. The smaller pieces go in the center. Those will catch fire first and help ignite the larger pieces around them. And with love, without getting desperate, trusting that everything will turn out all right even when everything looks bad (putting faith to use like a true believer), you cook whatever it is you have to cook.
I repeat: I’m happy! And I’m ashamed of this happiness, which I never felt with my other stoves: kerosene, electric, gas… Maybe it’s because I find this one ingenious, and it speaks to me of the human capacity to survive even under such adverse circumstances. And that deserves credit.
Or maybe because I find it more charming than the others, while my subconscious, in its mysterious determination to keep going with life, questions me even as I tell myself: this is a step backward. Or maybe I’m not taking it seriously, I can’t quite believe it, and I’m creating other ways of coping with life that I still haven’t fully become aware of.
I don’t know. What I can tell you is that I arrived home very happy. I told my mother and aunt that I now have a stove even more curious than our eternal portable stove, which we use to roast coffee and cook all the meals we need when there is neither gas nor electricity. I can hardly believe how happy I am. In any case, I hope that somehow, twenty years from now, I’ll be able to tell this story as a joke from my life. Like so many others I already have, things that at the time were… whew, some harsh realities.
I like your new little stove! It is another excellent Cuban invention, incorporating ingenuity and recycled elements. They say “necessity is the mother of invention.” I think that mother has taken up residence in Cuba.
Keep writing, Lien! I enjoy your diary posts.
~ Jenny