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Oddly Enough - Reuters

Chewing Gum Back in Castro's Cuba-Just for Show
Mon Sep 30, 9:30 AM ET
By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) - M&M's are back in Cuba.



So is Wrigley's Spearmint gum, and a host of American products -- from Kellogg's Corn Flakes to Uncle Ben's rice and Sara Lee cakes -- not sold on the Communist-run island since the 1950s.

So far, however, they are just on show, tantalizingly close for many Cubans who recall the days of American influence before Fidel Castro ( news - web sites)'s revolution turned to the Soviet Union and Washington slapped trade sanctions on Cuba.

Classic American household names and the fast food king -- the burger -- went on display on Thursday at the first trade fair by major U.S. food companies trying to take advantage of new rules and recover a market they lost four decades ago.

"As kids, we would fight for M&M's," says Cuban journalist Enrique Lopez Oliva, 65, for whom the little candies are a symbol of his generation. "We ate them at the cinema, watching films of cowboys and gangsters."

M&Ms and chewing gum were part of the U.S. influence in Cuba, along with baseball, basketball and the American cars of the 1950s still chugging along dilapidated Havana streets.

"Gum was chewed here until 1961. It was sold at the cinema entrance in those days, and popcorn too," recalls Angel Tomas Gonzalez, another Cuban reporter. Castro banned gum in 1959 as ideologically unacceptable in the new socialist workers' state.

It wasn't until 1993, when Cuba was forced to accept the inevitable and legalize the dollar, the currency of its main political foe, that chewing gum reappeared.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Castro -- an avowed enemy of capitalism -- has allowed a limited opening to a free market and flirted with foreign investors. Late last year, Cuba started buying U.S. food -- wheat, corn, rice, chicken, apples -- after Washington eased its trade embargo under pressure from farm states and agribusiness eager to return to a traditional nearby market.

Chewing gum is among items classified as food.

HAVANA AS PLAYGROUND

Back in the 1950s, when Havana was a playground for Americans and Mafia bosses, supermarkets sold meat that was cut and packed in the United States, ready for the Cuban consumer, Oliva said.

Today, young Cubans have no "chewing gum culture," said Gonzalez, and fast food joints that arrived in the 1940s to replace the Spanish cafes disappeared.

Since opening up to tourism and the U.S. dollar in the last decade, Cuba has created fast food outlets -- some called El Rapido -- that are a pale imitation.

The Castro government is now seeking to improve the quality of food products in Cuba by turning to the old enemy.

' Earlier this year, Marsh Supermarkets of Indiana became the first U.S. company to sell branded products to Cuba in 43 years. Marsh soda bottles are now sold in dollar-priced shops in Havana.

At the five-day U.S. Food and Agribusiness Exhibition, chief sponsor Archer Daniels Midland erected a 1950s diner, the icon of American cuisine, complete with stools and Wurlitzer juke box. Cuban officials will get to taste soy burgers and vanilla shakes mixed with Cuban bananas.

Master Foods Interamerica, subsidiary of Mars Inc., makers of M&Ms, Milky Way and Mars bars and Uncle Ben's rice, does not expect to land an enormous quantity of contracts.

So far the company goods are only sold in duty-free shops at Cuba's airports. "We are looking at Cuba's 1.8 million tourists a year, who know our products," said Master's international marketing manager, Philippe Belland.