Once Fidel Castro's Chef

Nina Strochlic

Nina Strochlic/The Daily Beast

Down one of the streets that feeds into the central plaza, behind a set of double windows is the modest casa particular of José Marante and his wife, Ines.

Marante, a silver-haired man of 73, is the boisterous grandfather to seven. He introduced himself with a pound on the chest and an exclamation: “Maestro!” He immediately asked what he should make for dinner: Perhaps lobster?

Through a chain of gossipy hearsay from a hostel owner in Havana, it had come to my attention that Marante once served as a private chef for Castro. “Did Castro like lobster?” I ask. Marante put his finger to his lips and laughed, “Shhhh!”

Later, he comes back with a bag from the market filled with green bananas, and joins his wife in the kitchen, where she’s chopping garlic.

He offers a brief history of his time in battle with Castro. In 1961, at the tender age of 18, Marante volunteered to fight an American-backed insurgency attempt at Playa Giron, or the Bay of Pigs. “I wasn’t scared,” he says in Spanish.

Though the fighting only lasted three days, Marante says he spent three weeks cooking for Castro. Earlier in the revolution, he had also cooked for his righthand man, Camilo Cienfuegos, at a hotel where Marante worked. They ate everything, he reports—no food was a favorite during those politically uncertain times.

Later, over a meal of rice, beans, plantain chips, and fish fillet, and a geometrically impressive salad arrangement, he brings out his war medals upon request: two for valor, one for cooking, another for his teaching. “I’m still very strong,” he says, flexing his muscles.

Marante met many of the top guerrillas during that time, but he never shook hands with the man that has since risen to saint levels in Cuba and across the world.

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