HAVANA TIMES — When the power goes out and the ice melts, advice that sounds like salvation begins circulating through Cuban neighborhoods. Someone once said that wrapping meat in plastic and burying it keeps it fresh. The recipe passes from mouth to mouth, from one backyard to another, as if the earth could do what the refrigerator no longer can. No report confirms it, and no authority endorses it. There is only the desperation of someone who has just spent money they don’t have on a piece of beef and doesn’t want to watch it rot.
But before that myth existed, there was something else: a real technique, tested over centuries, that is no longer enough today either.
Tasajo is salted, sun-dried beef. Its origins can be traced to the Atlantic trade that connected the Río de la Plata region with Havana. The Spanish introduced the technique of salting and dehydrating meat in these lands, and it was already well established in the Spanish American viceroyalties by the 16th century. By the late 18th century, tasajo from the Río de la Plata region in Argentina was regularly shipped to Cuba. In 1785, the first ship loaded with the product set sail for the island, and the trade grew so much that it soon became a steady supply, feeding the enslaved population on sugar plantations.
The technique is simple: meat, salt, sun. Nothing more. That is why, for generations, it served as a source of protein for households without refrigerators. Salt draws out the moisture, the sun finishes the job, and the meat can last for weeks without spoiling.
Today, even that is out of reach.
Salt is in short supply in Cuba. In late 2024, the state-owned Salt Company acknowledged that it had accumulated a shortfall of thousands of tons owed to the Ministry of Domestic Trade. The gap had persisted for more than two years, resulting in continued shortages and interruptions in the sale of salt through the ration book system. Distribution resumed in May 2025, but in some areas salt arrived in bulk, without packaging, depending on availability. And the salt that does arrive is often damp.
The only saltworks in the country capable of producing dry salt using an adequate technological process is located in Guantanamo, and it supplies only Havana and its own province. The rest of the country receives damp salt processed using equipment that was not originally designed for that purpose.
Without dry salt, making tasajo is impossible. Without electricity, there is no refrigerator. And without a refrigerator, people do what they can: buy food for the day, cook it immediately, or turn to myths like burying meat wrapped in plastic.
The supply chain is breaking down at every point. Tasajo, which for two centuries was Cuba’s answer to the absence of refrigeration, is now beyond reach as well. Not because the technique has been lost, but because one of its two basic ingredients—salt—has become a scarce, damp, rationed, and intermittently available commodity.
And this is where the myth of burying meat stops being a quaint anecdote and becomes a public health problem.
The earth does not refrigerate. A plastic bag is not a refrigerator. Instead, it traps moisture from the meat, creating a warm, sealed environment where bacteria can thrive unchecked. If the meat already came from a market without a proper cold chain, burying it simply adds another layer of risk.
Bacteria that cause food poisoning—such as salmonella and E. coli—may be present in raw meat and can multiply rapidly when its temperature is not controlled. They do not always cause obvious changes in smell or color, and simply washing the surface is not enough to eliminate them.
Symptoms of food poisoning range from diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal cramps to fever and chills. In severe cases, urgent medical attention may be necessary. In a country where obtaining medication and hospital care is becoming increasingly difficult, food poisoning is no minor inconvenience.
There are other methods that have a sound basis. Salting and drying meat in the sun is a Cuban tradition practiced when salt is available, although often it is not. Frying meat and covering it with fat, or preserving it in vinegar and garlic, are options recommended even by people who have lived through previous crises. None is ideal. None restores freshness. But at least they do not promise what they cannot deliver.
Meanwhile, the plastic-bag myth continues to spread. On an island where electricity is an unpredictable visitor, people keep searching for places to hide their meat from the heat. And sometimes, when there are no answers, the earth seems as good a place as any.
But the earth does not save. It only buries. And when it comes to meat, sometimes it buries the health of the person who eats it, too.
Read more from the diary of Safie M. Gonzalez here on Havana Times.