More magical realism.
The books of Montaner are read by the CC of the Cuban CP. Not that ordinary Cubans get to read them. They aren't allowed to read Susan Sontag either.
http://www.firmaspress.com/407.htm
>..It has been a long time since Castro made the brave decision to remake cows. At the start of the revolution, he attempted to create a breed of giant cows that could provide both milk and meat. He himself conducted the experiment on the roof of one of his houses in central Havana, an anecdote that Gabriel García Márquez incorporated, in disguise, into The Autumn of the Patriarch, one of his better novels.
It was a disaster. Castro soon discovered that if he killed the cow he lost the milk. Later, he found out that cows specialize: Some give good, abundant milk; others are an ample source of meat. The breed he engineered, in the best Marxist-Leninist tradition, barely gave milk and barely provided meat. It was a mess and, as such, was abandoned.
After the debacle of the communist world, Castro returned to the topic of cows, this time with a different plan. East Germany had disappeared and with it the huge amounts of powdered milk that it donated to the island. Simultaneously, Cuba, already bereft of Soviet subsidies, had little fuel to transport goods. So Castro had the bizarre idea of designing a tiny milk cow every Cuban family could keep at home, just as if it were a dog.
In theory, he even solved the problem of how to feed the animal: a tray cabinet or pile of boxes where grass could be grown artificially. The cow could eat from one tray while grass grew in another. Then the animal would raise or lower its head and continue to eat.
The cow's droppings could be used for fuel, as they are in India, and the younger members of the family would be entrusted to take the cow out to urinate on the street. It was obvious that leading a cow down and up a five-story staircase would be a somewhat complicated chore. But no difficulty should paralyze the will of a true revolutionary.
Castro's dissatisfaction with the size of animals and his plans to correct the defects of nature are legendary. In the 1960s, he attempted to develop breeds of huge frogs and rabbits to end the Cubans' shortage of protein. He didn't try to cross the animals -- his imagination has some limits -- but he started large farms of these breeds that eventually were abandoned. Why? No one knows. Maybe they refused to grow, maybe they starved to death, maybe they fled in fear. Anything is possible in that country.
Some day -- not today, because my space is running out -- I shall tell you about the time when the Comandante got the idea to produce, drink and serve buffalo-cow milk made into a foul-smelling yogurt. That mania struck at a time when Castro was raising a bear, a gift from Brezhnev, in a cage, like a dissident, in the vast gardens of his home.
For some strange reason, Castro came to the conclusion that the bear would grow strong and healthy on a diet of buffalo-cow yogurt. However, the bear came down with grievous intestinal spasms, shed its fur and ended up howling like a wolf. By the time it died, it was a thoroughly Cuban bear.
Agosto 8, 2004.