A new hunger: food shortages and satires of the state in Cuban and Egyptian cultural production

ABSTRACT

This paper delineates a distinctly post-1960s expression of hunger and desire for food in Cuban and Egyptian cultural production. Hunger has always been present in aesthetic renditions of everyday life in both locales. Following the early-1960s socialist expansion of the role of the state, a new expression of hunger for animal protein emerged that relied on vegetarian tropes and parodied official discourse. Expressions of this “new hunger” captured the contradictory state of being conditioned, through state food programs, to see the consumption of animal products as the epitome of a healthy diet that endows one with the status of being “developed” and “modern” while simultaneously not being afforded satisfactory access to those food items due to conditions beyond one’s individual control. In such contexts, the average citizen is primarily vegetarian and not by choice, while those with access to power live the promised dream of carnivorous plenty. This article analyzes several political speeches, cartoons, jokes, and songs to map the rhetorical and aesthetic characteristics of such satiric expressions and demonstrate how they were informed by the growing gap between early revolutionary official promises of food for all and actual food shortages.

KEYWORDS:

• Literature
• poetry
• song
• satire
• Cuba
• Egypt
• nasser
• castro
• meat
• development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All translations in this article mine.

2. See: Relli Shechter, The Rise of the Egyptian Middle Class Socio-Economic Mobility and Public Discontent from Nasser to Sadat (Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, Shechter 2019); T. Draper, “Five years of Castro’s Cuba,” Quadrant 8(1) (Draper 1964); John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: the political economy of two regimes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, Waterbury 1983); Dudley Seers, Andres Bianchi, Richard Jolly, Max Nolff, Cuba: The Economic and Social Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,Draper 1964); and Bob Whitney, “Is the Cuban Revolution Dead? An Historian’s Reflections,” Labor, Capital and Society / Travail, Capital et Société 28, no 1 (1995).: 95–103.

3. For details on this restructuring in Cuba see: Mesa-Lago, The Economy of Socialist Cuba: A Two-Decade Appraisal (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,Mesa-Lago 1981). For details on the Egyptian case see: Khalid Ikram, The Egyptian economy, 1952–2000: Performance, Policies, and Issues, Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern economies (London; New York: Routledge Ikram 2006).

4. For more on the complex relationship between official ideology and everyday life see Katherine A. Gordy, Living Ideology in Cuba: Socialism in Principle and Practice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Gordy 2015); and Chávez Lydia and Mimi Chakarova, Capitalism God and a Good Cigar: Cuba Enters the Twenty-First Century (Durham: Duke University Press, Lydia and Chakarova 2005).

5. In the book the dictator, a thinly veiled Sadat, is called Bahgatus, and he rules the country of Bahgatiya. Both names are a play on the cartoonist’s name.

6. Then president Anwar al-Sadat called it “intifadat al-haramiyah” (The Thieves’ Uprising) in several public speeches.

7. Negm served a total of eighteen years in prison between all three presidents for his outspoken poetry.

8. The word for an official in Arabic, Mas’ūl, also means a “responsible” person and so the word is used as a pun in the text.

9. I have followed many leads about who Muhsin might be but I have, thus far, been unable to independently verify any of them. The only high profile official or state representative named Muhsin during January 1977 was Mushin Muhammad, the editor-in-chief of al-Jumhuriyya (the Republic) – a newspaper established after 1952 to be the revolutionary regime’s mouthpiece and the third-largest state-owned newspaper in Egypt. His daily column “Min al-Qalb” (From the Heart) did not address dietary issues in the weeks before or after the time of the uprisings. Given that Negm has used pseudonyms to refer to government officials including Sadat in other poems such as “Ba’arit Haha”, I am treating Muhsin similarly in this analysis.

10. Whereas during the process of nation-state formation, predominantly Christian countries separated church and state to undermine the centralized church’s power and divert its resources to the secular state, predominantly Muslim countries had to do the opposite to gain the same type and amount of control over their new borders. Since Islam is a decentralized religion, i.e., any learned person could interpret texts and create their own school of thought, curbing the potential of decentralized interpretations from becoming dissident movements necessitated the centralization of religious affairs and their placement under government oversight.

11. Depictions of a person’s position of power through their ability to access prime cuts of beef in times of extreme shortages is a popular trope in many films and novels of the 1970s and 80s. See, for instance, Mrat Ragul Muhim (The Wife of an Important Man) where the protagonist’s husband’s meteoric rise in the ranks then fall from grace is portrayed through his ability to provide his wife first with juicy and then later with tough cuts of meat.

12. A lot has been written about censorship in Cuba and in Egypt. Two examples are the edited volume by Salāmah Ghassān, Dīmuqrāṭīyah min dūn dīmuqrāṭīyīn (Beirut: Markaz Dirāsāt al-Wiḥdah al-ʻArabīyah, Ghassan 1995) and Coco Fusco, Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (London: Tate Publishing, Coco 2015).

13. Like other mid-twentieth century cooking shows around the world, Villapol’s Cucina al-minuto, targeted the busy modern woman who had an office or factory job but was also still expected to single handedly and efficiently fulfill her duties as homemaker. The focus on quick, nutritious and fulfilling meals made Villapol, who notoriously and ironically did not enjoy cooking, a household name for the new nuclear family.

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Eman S. Morsi

Eman S. Morsi is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College and a scholar of modern Arabic and Spanish Latin American literary and cultural studies. As a comparatist her research lies at the intersection of the cultural and the political and is in conversation with postcolonial, decolonial, and Third World studies. Her first book, provisionally titled, Utopia Incarnate: Narratives of Consumption and the Body in Cuban and Egyptian Cultural Production, explores the ways that Cuban and Egyptian writers and artists throughout the second half of the twentieth century used meat (lahm in Arabic and carne in Spanish, both meaning meat and flesh) and its by-products as metaphors for the early utopian promises of the state and its later dystopian realities.