Latins in the Borough Art Gallery's photostream

Cuban cook Mrs. Maria Hidalgo from Cuba gave a Cuban cuisine demonstration at Expressiones Cultural Center in New London. A great experience that provided us a new vision of Cuba, its culture and its inhabitants. Public could see and try the flavors and richness of the Cuban cuisine. Cuban cuisine is a fusion of Spanish, African and Caribbean cuisines. Cuban recipes share spices and techniques with Spanish and African cooking, with some Caribbean influence in spice and flavor. A small, but noteworthy, Chinese influence can also be accounted for, mainly in the Havana area. For historical reasons, the Cuban population was not equally distributed along the island. Africans were a majority in the sugar cane plantations, but in most of the cities they constituted a minority. Tobacco plantations were inhabited mainly by poor Spanish peasants, mostly from the Canary Islands. The eastern part of the island also received massive quantities of French, Haitian and Caribbean immigrants, mainly during the Haitian Revolution, as well as seasonal workers for the sugar cane harvest, while the western part did not, receiving instead European, mostly Spanish, immigration well into the 1950s. Thus Cuban cuisines developed locally, from the influences and demographics specific to each area. Cuban cuisine is very different from Mexican cuisine, a fact which sometimes comes as a surprise to visitors from Canada, the United States or Europe[1]. While Mexican cuisine is primarily a mix of Spanish and Aztec traditions, Cuban food has been influenced by many traditions, owing to the complex history of the Caribbean area.