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Cuba's paladares (private home-based restaurants)
The name paladar comes from a Brazilian soap opera, which was extremely popular in Cuba in the early 1990s. Raquel, the enterprising protagonist of the telenovela, was a poor woman who moved from the Brazilian provinces to Rio. She worked as an itinerant food vendor on the famous beaches of Copacabana and eventually made it big after setting up her own chain of small restaurants, which she christened "Paladar."
Literally meaning "palate" in both Spanish and Portuguese, the curious origin of the name "paladar" hints at the initial high hopes Cubans had for the potential of these private, home-grown eateries during the worst stages of the "special period" that began in 1990. At the time the soap-opera was making Cuban mouths water, the size of the legal self-employed sector was negligible and private restaurants were forbidden by law.
However, paladar-like restaurants began springing up across the island in the early 1990s in response to the growing scarcity of food. Armed with an unyielding hope mixed with a deep sense of the absurd, Cubans followed Raquel’s lead by beginning to refer to their own home-grown restaurants as paladares.
In September 1993, as an administrative response to the multitude of homegrown survival strategies developed by the Cuban people, the government decided to legalize over 100 self-employed occupations. Included among these occupations were food service activities.
Legalization of food service and restaurants encouraged competition and contracted employees. Despite the crackdown, the number of these speak-easy eateries was estimated to be as high as 4,000 nationwide by early 1994, with perhaps 1,500 located in Havana alone. In June 1995, the government approved a resolution that finally recognized and began to legally regulate paladares. The new law laid out three specific types of food service operations that would be henceforth allowed. This list included street vendors, home-front vendors, caterers, and full-fledged home-based paladares.
Paladar operators would have to pay monthly taxes in the currency in which they charged their customers. Restrictions limited each household to a single self-employment license, required that operators purchase their supplies either in state-run dollar-stores or in private farmer's markets, mandated that restaurateurs save all receipts as proof of legal supply sources. Finally, paladares were subject to unannounced visits from three different inspector corps.
Many of Havana's legally registered paladares have been driven out of business or underground since 1996 when they reached their high water mark of perhaps 500. Fortunately, Havana still boasts between 60 and 90 paladares of varying quality and price located throughout the city. In general, only the largest, strongest, and most well-connected operations have been able to survive . Despite the crackdown, most paladares that managed to survive through 2002 are in business today and many have continued to renovate their facilities and expand their offerings considerably.
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