Cortadito. Enrique Fernández

      Greta Garbo not only famously laughs in Ninotchka; she participates in an endorsement of the cuisine of exile. This hilarious 1939 A Bolshevik in Paris film gives us Garbo as a stern Russian Communist courted by an aristocratic Melvyn Douglas and accompanied by a trio of bumbling compatriots. At the end of the film, Douglas wins her Bolshevik heart; having earlier dismissed romance, Ninotchka now prefers it to ideology. Soviet Russia is not fit for living and certainly not fit for love, so she stays with her beloved in Turkey, where she has been sent on a mission—engineered by Douglas—to handle the nincompoop trio. Shedding their Communist personae, they have become exiled capitalists by opening a successful Russian restaurant in Istanbul. The Russians conclude that even though they are exiled from the Motherland, they have not left it, for it is present in the restaurant’s borscht, its vodka, and its music. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch and written by Billy Wilder, exiles both, the movie finds its happily-ever-after not only in the romance of Garbo and Douglas, but in the equally happy discovery that national identity lives on in an exile restaurant.

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      Walking along Manhattan’s Lower East Side on a quest for a cup of joe, I see a restaurant sign that reads “Cortadito.” I’m Cuban and live in Miami, where cortadito—espresso with steamed milk or milk foam—is everywhere, so I go in. Cuban music is on the sound system. And the menu is pure Miami Cuban. I ask the hipster Latino waiter for the eponymous cortadito and am about to order something else when some instinct makes me pause and ask the lady who seems to be in charge, “Are you all Cuban?”

      “No,” she replies, “we’re Ecuadoreans.”

      A faux Miami Cuban restaurant in New York. Figures. How far would a business go selling Ecuadorean cuisine, which, for all I know, is terrific? But cubano, oh yeah. Everybody knows Cuban. Everybody knows Cuba. And not just in Miami, where we Cubans are the majority of Latinos, who are the majority of the population, never mind the ones who run the town. I have visited putative Cuban restaurants in Rio de Janeiro and Nashville. The only Cuban element in the Brazilian spot was Gloria Estefan on the sound system; in the country-music capital, it was a cigar-humidor room where they sold Cuban brands—made outside Cuba since true habanos are illegal in the US.

      Some years ago, I read about a trendy New York restaurant called Calle Ocho, the Spanish name for Southwest Eighth Street, the main drag of Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood. Trouble was that at the time there wasn’t a single trendy Cuban restaurant on the real Calle Ocho. On a visit to New York after an absence of a few years, I was taken to Asia de Cuba, which was the name of a family-owned Cuban-Chinese restaurant when I lived in the city, and was now a big, swinging joint run by China Grill. “I hate to say this,” I told my hosts, “but the only Cuban thing about this place right now is me.”

      No matter; Cuban was way cool. Avant-garde even, with a phenom called Nuevo Cubano: the principles of New American Cooking applied to the traditional Cuban menu. Nuevo Cubano has an interesting history, but by the time I dined in Manhattan’s Asia de Cuba, at the beginning of the millennium, there was no need to serve up any connection to a real place. A name would do. The rest was, as far as I could tell, the China Grill menu served with a Cuban soundtrack.

      That was the time when, walking around the city, I spotted another Nuevo Cubano eatery way over on the Midtown West Side. It proudly displayed a banner with a quote by patriot and poet José Martí, the father of the Cuban Republic. And the quote was in Spanish. Sort of. (Quoting Martí is a Cuban national pastime, both on and off the island, across the political spectrum. Even the remnants of a movement that would have been anathema to a staunch patriot like Martí—the anexionistas, Cubans who would have the island become part of the American Union—quote Martí. I’d never claim we are a sane people.)

      Martí famously said, “With all and for the good of all,” which some liberal Cuban Americans have used to promote the notion that in spite of ideology, our attitudes and policies should be inclusive because we Cubans are all brothers and sisters. Except that on the restaurant’s banner the quote was back-translated, meaning that someone, instead of going to the original Spanish, did a literal translation into Spanish of an English translation from Spanish. The result, Con todos y para el bueno de todos, is totally illiterate. “The good” is not el bueno (the name for the good guy in the white hat in an old-fashioned Western), but el bien, a word that means “well” but in this case means “welfare,” i.e. benefit. I don’t have to add that I did not try the food for, obviously, the place was run by idiots, and disrespectful ones at that.

      And several years ago, when the Nuevo Cubano wave was just starting to roll, I was in L.A. at a restaurant that served the whole thing with heavy-handed hipster irony. Like a drink named after Che Guevara, something that would’ve gotten the joint firebombed in Miami. Indeed, places there had been firebombed for far less.

      Cuban

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