Monday 18 July 2011

The government’s finest accomplishment: Coppelia ice-cream parlour?

Cubans country over love ice cream. I can’t reliably suggest they enjoy it more than the Brits, Italians or Argentines, but they sure do get through it, often preferring a tub of ice cream, or a ‘salad’ of 5 large balls instead of a simple ’99 for example. Why have just one ball when you can have 5?! Why indeed, especially when it’s hot year round and is generally a cheap snack. I seemed to go a month without having any of the stuff but somehow since Helen’s arrival we seem to have made ice cream tasting an integral part of our country tour. I’m not complaining though – in addition to being an enjoyable experience, the pastime of going for an ice cream provides another fascinating point of departure into Cuban life, and in some cases is where the contrast between Cubans and tourists is most notable. This was especially the case in Parque Coppelia, which we felt compelled to visit twice: once as tourists and once masquerading as locals with some Cuban friends.  If such a case study sounds too good to be true, that’s probably because it is. But it does make for good content if we’re still interested in the difference between locals and tourists in the capital.

Coppelia is the number one brand of ice cream in Cuba. Perhaps Nestle pips it to the post in terms of sales, since it seems to have a complete monopoly over corner shop ice cream freezers, but Coppelia beats it hands down in the flavour stakes and the fact that it’s about 101% more Cuban than its competitor. In addition to a presence in most major towns, Coppelia’s number one destination in Cuba is within Parque Coppelia nestled within Havana’s Vedado district.

This parlour, built in 1966 by the government (perhaps one of their best pieces of work?!) and sprung to superstardom after key product placement in Tomás Guitierrrez Alea’s classic movie, Fresa y Chocolate, Coppelia is the biggest ice-creamery in the world: serving around 300 000 a day who flock to the parque to form snake like queues around and around the park fences.

I’ll come back to the Cuban ability to make a queue out of anything at another time (sounds boring but it really does warrant some description and explanation) but for now it will suffice to say that Coppelia is the epicentre of the queue: with no less than two on each corner of the square winding their way around the park with its length seemingly proportional to the strength of the sun. We couldn’t quite work out how you decided which queue to join but it must have something to do with where you wish to sit, given that the park was divided into zones.  

The first time we visited it was with Koral and Cassim- and it became evident from the beginning that we were going to get the Cuban experience. We arrived at around 7pm: still hot enough to enjoy but thankfully after the rush hour, and apparently we were lucky only to queue for around a half hour before being let into the park and directed to a busy seating area full of Cuban families tucking into bowls and bowls of what looked like vanilla ice cream with biscuity sprinkles on top.

We sat down and read the choice of flavours: vanilla and vanilla with chocolate swirls. It wasn’t clear whether choice was limited to these flavours usually, or whether we’d just chosen a day when they’d run out. (It’s not hard to believe that a wider choice is a luxury, though.) Once we’d sat down it quickly became apparent that the done thing seemed to be to ask for an ‘ensalada’ – 5 balls, together with some portions of ‘dulces’ (sweet cakes) - anything less “wouldn’t have been worth it!”  We waited only 5 minutes (in which time I nipped to the loo where the Cuban experience continued – no cubicle doors, water, paper or soap) for our large bowls of ice cream to arrive, and were suitably impressed by the quality. It was yum! By the time Helen and I had finished taking a couple of photos to record the experience and exchanged the verdict on the flavours however, we looked up to see both Koral and Cassim finishing off the dulces and ice cream. This explains why most people order in double quantities – perhaps like the sun the time you have to queue is proportional to the amount of balls you deserve!

After reassuring Koral we’d had a great time, and that we were more than happy to treat them (all in all our ice cream experience cost around $20 pesos moneda nacional, or less than $1 CUC –less than £1) we agreed it would be ridiculous to come here as a ‘tourist’ and pay in CUC for the same experience. Despite this we remained curious: could this really be up to 20 times more expensive for tourists, and if so what frills and extras would be available? We simply had to find out – though of course without confiding this with them.
 
So, we returned the next day, and from the moment of our arrival things were completely different. For one, we did not queue. Instead we were allowed to stream past yards of Cubans waiting patiently and find a seat in a separate part of the park, where there was a handful of tourists and a rather mediocre atmosphere. Secondly, there were suddenly five flavours to choose from. For the sake of the experiment we ordered the same thing: an ensalada of 5 balls, which this time came not with crushed biscuits but biscotti, chocolate swirls, honey and instead of a plastic bowl it came in a glass sundae bowl.

And the verdict: looks can be deceiving - being a tourist was nowhere near as much fun! For starters it felt like daylight robbery. Remembering that 5 large bowls of ice cream and side plates of cake had cost us around $1CUC the day before we begrudgingly handed over $5CUC a piece for an inferior experience. The loo may have had a door this time, but the honey and chocolate was unnecessary, the company was nowhere near as much fun and it did not taste that much better to justify the vastly inflated price. The queue in the sun, asking for a mountain of ice cream and savouring it as a family or with a group of friends seemed to be part and parcel of life for the habanero and it felt like a shame to be excluding ourselves from it - if even to do a trial. As I’ve already said I expect to pay more as a tourist but such blatant profiteering felt wrong given how superior an experience we’d had the day before sat together both foreigners and Cubans enjoying an ice cream in the sun.

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