Babalu Blog: Place your orders now, inmates

May 11, 2005

Place your orders now, inmates

Remember that dumbass restaurant in Providence I wrote about a few months back? The one called "Cuban Revolution?" Well, I just received the following via email from the New Jersey Herald News:

Creating the cult of (f)idel (c)astro
Tuesday, May 10, 2005

By ROGER HERNANDEZ

I continue to be amazed at the public displays of ignorance about Cuba's communist dictatorship. The star-struck celebrities who flock to Havana and worship at (f)idel (c)astro's feet. College kids who think it is cool to wear a Che T-shirt. Journalists and academics who defend the regime after 46 years of human-rights abuses.

And now, a restaurant devoted to the cult of (f)idel (c)astro.

It is located in Providence, R.I., and is called Cuban Revolution. Its Web site is full of pictures of (c)astro and Guevara, and apparently so is the restaurant itself, to go by its proclamation that "Our food, decor and the music you hear are specifically selected to set the stage for a return to an era when challenging the norm was the norm, when individual expression was rampant, and the zeal and promise of revolutionary Cuba filled the air."

The menu is fake-Cuban. One special platter is "The Fidel," $8.50 for a Cuban sandwich with black beans and rice. Most of the other items have little to do with Cuban cooking - salads, hamburgers, veggie wraps. There's something called a Cuban burrito, but burritos are Mexican, not Cuban. The owners seem to know as little about Cuban food as they know about Cuban politics.

That bit about "individual expression" is just one part of a politico-gastronomic manifesto so bizarrely misguided on so many counts I kept looking for signs that the whole thing is a put-on, some sort of postmodern, irony-filled critique of the Castro-worship syndrome.

But no, no sign of that. This is for real.

"We honor the revolutionary spirit of individuals who struggle against tyranny and oppression," says the Web site. It adds that the Cuban revolution's purpose was "to restore basic human rights" and says one aim of Cuban Revolution, the restaurant, is to "promote individual freedom."

Don't they realize the Castro regime they so honor is actually a tyranny that oppresses the courageous individuals who struggle against it? That every international human-rights organization agrees it denies citizens every basic human right? That a restaurant making a murderous regime seem an idealistic utopia does the exact opposite of promoting individual freedom?

Then there is the sop to "the agony of those Cuban-Americans whose lives may have been horribly disrupted by the Revolution." Spare me the sympathy. The only point of this restaurant is to glorify one of the world's last Marxist dictatorships.

Well, not really. It's to make money while glorifying one of the world's last Marxist dictatorships, a concept that reaches heretofore unscaled heights of delusional incoherence with an invitation to franchisees: "We welcome inquiries from serious individuals with the financial ability and business competence to operate a successful restaurant concept in a multi unit territory."

Of course, that capitalist territory would not include Cuba itself. Owning a restaurant there is against the law.

Feeling somewhere between outraged, saddened and amused, I phoned the place to ask the owner how it was possible to open a restaurant that paid tribute to one of the world's longest-reigning dictatorships while at the same time claiming to "promote individual freedoms." A woman who identified herself as the manager said the owner was one Ed Morabito, and gave me a cell-phone number. I called and identified myself as a newspaper columnist to the man who answered; he said that yes, he was Ed Morabito, but insisted he had nothing to do with the restaurant. I called the restaurant back, and a woman told me she was not allowed to give out the owner's phone number and that, anyway, Rhode Island was home to "multiple Ed Morabitos."

Turns out this one was chief of staff to former Rhode Island Gov. Linc Almond and an independent candidate in Rhode Island's 2nd Congressional District last November, when he won 3 percent of the vote.

Why a Castroite restaurant? None of the multiple Morabitos seems willing to explain. Chalk it up to stupidity. And kick it up a notch to hypocritical stupidity.

On May 20th, I will be posting an entry from the Cuba Nostalgia Convention calling for you all out there to barrage this place with emails and telephone calls of dissatisfaction. I hope you all take the time to send these assholes a few choice words.

I hear there will also be a campaign on that date specifically, via internet and emails, to barrage the place with food orders to be delivered to the various prisons throughout fidel castro's island. Should be quite interesting...

(Thanks to Keith F. for the heads up.)

Posted by Val Prieto at May 11, 2005 01:26 PM

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» Eight Days To Cuba Nostalgia from The Laughing Wolf
Get on over to Val's and check things out. If you can do something to help with his part of Cuba Nostalgia, then please do it. If nothing else, read the posts so that ignorance such as this and this... [Read More]

Tracked on May 12, 2005 06:31 AM

» Politico-Gastronomic Manifesto, Part Two from The Waterglass
Val Prieto points us to a send-up done in the New Jersey Herald News of the castro-fellating restaurant called Cuban Revolution: The menu is fake-Cuban. One special platter is "The Fidel," $8.50 for a Cuban sandwich with black beans and... [Read More]

Tracked on May 12, 2005 08:06 AM

Tracked on October 13, 2005 08:21 AM

Comments

Count on me.
My e-mail to those suckers time ago went unanswered. But I can call them and give them hell!

Posted by: CB at May 11, 2005 01:49 PM

Ditto

Posted by: Kathleen at May 11, 2005 02:02 PM

Thank you Thank you! I thought we were the only ones that were going to do this here in Miami, but now our Cuban brothers in NJ are going to do the same.
These pigs won't sell one thing that day.

Lets try and take this nationwide!! there is only one week left.

Posted by: mojoman at May 11, 2005 02:34 PM

I've never been to Cuba, but I have been to several communist countries, and from my experience a communist-theme restaurant should have:

1. no selection
2. bland, room-temperature food
3. no ice
4. bad service
5. much lower prices than these

And since when was individual expression the norm in a communist dictatorship?

Posted by: el bibliotecario at May 11, 2005 02:55 PM

Too bad no one is there to piss in their cheerios.

Posted by: A.M. Mora y Leon at May 11, 2005 02:58 PM

That fake menu really makes me gag. It's just the thing for television-watching Che tee shirt clad people. Cuban burritos? Ohhh gawd!

I took a Brazilian girl around San Francisco last week and suggested for lunch that we go eat some good Burmese cooking at a restaurant I knew. She stopped me and said: 'But I have never tried a burrito. I would really like to.' I said, 'but of course!'

And we went to the Mission District and got her her first good Mexican burritos. I'd do the same for my Cubano friends, knowing very well they don't do burritos there either - and Brazilian cuisine is closer to Cuban cuisine than Mexican is.

Why are castro-worshippers so darn dumb?

Posted by: A.M. Mora y Leon at May 11, 2005 03:08 PM

I think this establishment is just another part of the Cuban propaganda network in the USA. It might be a Cuban front owned by someone especially for the dictatorship. Cuba does this all the time. The Center for Cuban Studies in NYC is a front and it was created and run by Cuban State Security. AfroCubaweb is the same. Marazul Tours is owned by Fransisco Aruca for the Cuban dictatorship. Remember in NYC - Cuba has a 13 storey building as their United Nations mission. Why does a Carribean nation - no matter that it is the largest in the region need a 13 storey building in New York City? I have seen it - it is humungous! There are nations that are much bigger than Cuba and they only have small brownstones as their UN missions. It is widely known that Cuba has a massive 365/24/7 network of public relations and propaganda running all around the world. People who work at the UN mission or the Washington DC "Interests Section" are constantly schmoozing media editors, educatiors, institutions, hospitals, student organizations, churches and clergy via the National Council of Churches...giving them free five star lunches and dinners and free trips to the island. A couple of years ago Cuba gave free trips to all the major TV network MSM executives. All the executives came back in a state of awe over Cuba. The NBC or CBS pres said that Cuba was the sexiest place he had ever been to!

I looked on whois.com to see who owned the website for the Cuban Revolution resturant - it is not listed - there is no owner listed meaning that it is like a private phone number so no one knows. This and the fact that they don't tell you who the owner is speaks volumes. This is a Cuban Castro front serving food - My friend tells me that there are countless places like this in Europe.

Posted by: mario at May 11, 2005 03:15 PM

That Hernandez family has a long history of fighting and writing for the cause. Keep up the good work Roger!

Posted by: hsilio at May 11, 2005 03:59 PM

I like Rhode Island in general, and Providence in particular, but this is fucking disgraceful.

Posted by: Dave J at May 11, 2005 05:48 PM

Cuban burritos. Oy vey's mir.

Posted by: Andrea Harris at May 11, 2005 10:12 PM

This is what I sent to "the Cuban Revolution". Of course, this message went unanswered.

"To the pathetic management:

this is a quote from one of your favorite criminals:
To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary...These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of El Pared�n!" --Ernesto 'Che' Guevara

And this is a quote from your favorite tyrant and terrorist:
"Cuba and Iran together can bring America down to her knees" --Fidel Castro

YOU HAVE BLOOD IN YOUR HANDS. JUST LETTING YOU KNOW.

The Cuban people is starving under a dictatorship and you have a restaurant called Cuban Revolution. What do you cook with? Pressure cookers, rice cookers? Is your menu a rationing card?

Let me remind you, since you're in a town that is friendly to gays, that Castro and Guevara themselves directed a very harsh series of progroms against homosexuals who were thrown in work camps called UMAP (military units of support to the production) with a sign in the door that said "Hard Work Will Make You Men"... sounds like Arbeit Macht Frei, or Work will liberate you, of their political ancestor Adolph Hitler.

All said, may you roast in hell with your fake IDOLS
XRay CHARLIE BRAVO"

Posted by: CB at May 11, 2005 11:08 PM