Perhaps because I, like most Latin Americans living in the U.S., like most immigrants for that matter. feel nostalgia for another reality, I sometimes wish a place like El Palacio de los Jugos, on the corner of Flagler Ave. and Bird road (57th St.) could be found all over town. And I don’t mean the spanking new branches of this juice-plus emporium that are springing elsewhere. I mean a place exactly like this one. Crowded, chaotic at first sight, funky.

A visit to El Palacio is a visit to not just Cuba but one that no longer exists. That is, one in which there is an abundance of foodstuffs. Organized like a Latin American mercado, El Palacio has several stands. One serves mostly sandwiches, including the famous Cuban but also a killer pan con lechón (roast pork sandwich). Another does nothing but seafood, from fried fish to full-tilt paellas. For the chicken paella we call arroz con pollo you go to another stand that serves classic Cuban dishes. Actually, there are two stands that do that.

Mariquitas (plantain chips) are a specialty at yet another one. And there are the eponymous tropical jugos, at a counter where you can also pay for the vast array of Cuban items on display in the center of the Palacio and on its fringes: tubers like yuca and malanga, black beans out of a huge plastic bin, tamarind pulp in plastic bags, fresh eggs, mangoes, papayas, avocados, you name it. There is also excellent queso fresco, the farmer’s cheese popular all over the Caribbean, cooked guavas in heavy syrup (to accompany the guava in the classic Cuban dessert of guayaba con queso), and many, many more items to matar a saudade, as Brazilians say in Portuguese: kill nostalgia.

El Palacio is constantly frying pork bellies for chicharrón, as well as pork chunks for masas de puerco. The fish stand serves codfish fritters, while one of the Cuban-dishes stands offers malanga fritters. There are also croquetas. You can never have too much fried food, a staple of the Caribbean menu. (I concede that Puerto Ricans are the true champs of this.)

I gulp a lot of papaya juice so the enzymes will help me digest all this savory, but, let’s face it, very rich food. All Caribbean fruits are enzyme rich, you can taste it as soon as you put the jugo to your lips. Particularly delicious is mamey, a fruit that looks like and has the texture of an avocado with a brown, furzzy peel and red, very sweet meat. And there’s guanábana, which, like so much tropical fruit, looks as impenetrable as an armadillo, but its juice is unbeatable. Outside the open building, close to the picnic tables where patrons enjoy the cooked treats, a man hacks coconuts open with a machete, sticks in a straw and sells fresh coconut juice in its shell.

The clientele is down-home Cuban. From the accents I hear, as well as other signifiers, I’d bet folk from el interior outnumber habaneros by far. But then that seems to be true of all Cuban Miami. Good thing, for it’s in the provinces where true culinary traditions thrive. Eating at El Palacio de los Jugos is great fun and tasty too. But if you could follow some of the patrons who go there to buy produce — and sometimes guinea fowl from local farmers — you would undoubtedly find the best Cuban cooking in town.

It hadn’t occurred to me. Not until an old friend, Eduardo González, on the Johns Hopkins faculty, told me he reads Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk in Spanish.

I had read the brilliant Turkish writer in English and he quickly became one of the few novelists I must read. But Pamuk writes in Turkish so there was no pressing reason to read him in English. And Eduardo, who like some of us, reads both languages, assured me the Spanish translation would do quite well.

His new book is The Museum of Innocence, a great love story, but I am reading El Museo de la Inocencia. Perhaps it’s knowing that Pamuk has been influenced by Borges — who hasn’t? Or that a Turkish woman I knew once — from my own remembered museum of innocence — told me Turks were enthralled with Spanish culture. For whatever reason, this read is turning out quite well.

I realize I have privileged English in my own reading of foreign authors. Spanish I reserve, or have reserved until now, for authors in that language who enthuse me, like Javier Marías or Zafón or Mayra Montero. I wouldn’t dream of reading them in English. But why not read Spanish rather than English translations of authors who write in a third language? Here in Miami, Spanish translations come by easily. Not that it matters. Amazon and the like are our new bookstores and they carry everything.

So I indulge in my first language as I follow the (very sexy) romance of the narrator and his mistress — he is engaged to marry someone else, uh oh. And I remember how, many years ago, I knew a young woman from Istanbul who, come to think of it, would talk to me in Spanish.

The Miami Bach Society’s Tropical Baroque Festival is in full swing and Thursday brings a concert by Argentina’s Capilla del Sol ensemble that should be of particular interest to anyone interested in Latin America.

The Baroque has been called Latin America’s defining style. But this is not just an extrapolation of the area’s lush creative phenomena, like the “magical realist” novels of Gabriel García Márquez and his contemporaries. The arts flourished during the actual Baroque period and they did so in a particularly criollo way.

Music in particular was blessed by the Spaniards’ efforts to evangelize the natives — even as they exploited them, but never mind. If there is little Baroque music in the English colonies and their modest Protestant churches, the grand Roman Catholic cathedrals of Latin Americas had organs, choirs, and master musicians. That was in the city. In the interior, where the Indian populations lived, there were missions. And just as in the cathedrals, the missions promoted music.

In Bolivia, the Jesuit missions grew in such importance that enemies of the Society of Jesus — and there have always been many of this religious order that sees itself as a military one — convinced the Spanish crown the priests were usurping power and should be thrown out. Before they packed up and left, however, the music composed in the missions, as well as the instruments to play it were left with the Indians who had been the Jesuits’ students, musicians and at a key point in the development of Latin American culture, the composers of sacred music.

The Indians held on to their heritage, keeping the written music in their homes and continuing to play, albeit in an improvised way when instruction ceased, the instruments left by the priests, or, eventually, made by the Indians themselves modeled after the originals.

In our times, musicologists have earned the Indians’ trust and recovered this cultural treasure. In some cases, this archeological effort, like so many others around the world, has been tainted by imperial arrogance — the “discovered” music is played with no credit to those who preserved it and whose ancestors often wrote it. Capilla del Sol acknowledges this is the music of the Bolivian Indians and is to be lauded for doing so.

Come hear  this marvel of the Latin American Baroque. When Indian talent met European form and created some of the most interesting criollo art of our always América barroca.

The Miami Bach Society is our local presenter of Early Music, defined in classical circles as compositions from the Baroque and earlier, back to the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. Early Music is performed on early instruments, often the predecessors of the ones that would become staples in symphony orchestras. Thus, the lute, that stringed piece that brings to mind troubadors, and the viol, which looks like a fretless cello and is played by the superstar of Early Music, Jordi Savall.

Beginning Saturday the Miami Bach Society presents its yearly Tropical Baroque Festival, Early Music riches from ensembles and soloists who travel here from around the world. Compared to other classical music, there is something earthy about Early Music, which may account why it hit its stride in the 1960s — since performers often wear all-black and can be hirsute, they sometimes look like rock bands unplugged.

The comparison is not gratuitous. Though this music hails from a time when divisions between high and low culture were already drawn, much of the repertoire could be described as Early Pop. Indeed, some pieces were performed in taverns — and some in cathedrals or at court.

So if you want to party like it was 1599, check out the festival at www.miamibachsociety.org.

Gabriel García Márquez has said that Cervantes wrote that a book was not complete unless it included a recipe for garbanzos. Gabo is a fabulist so I can’t vouch for the veracity of his statement, nor am I ever going to comb Don Quixote for the garbanzos. Still, the statement hold a deeper truth. Food is culture.

Thus, in these forays through the cultural life of our city there has to be food. What kind? Ah, if you expect the lofty culinary equivalents of opera and chamber music, the nueva cocina or cocina de autor that has swept the culinary word, I will disappoint you. The food I go looking for is funk.

I’m not alone. Serious gastronomes hold that a dish like tripe is preferred by peasants and kings, the former because that’s all they can afford, the latter because they know it’s the greatest. I love tripe. And pig’s feet. And oxtail. In this field, however, there is refinement. Thus, calves’ liver is a delicate treat, so different from the cow’s liver I grew up with (higado a la italiana, liver sauteed with onions and green peppers, a staple of the Cuban menu) and never quite took to. When I first tasted calve’s I never went back.

So when I ventured into a supermarket in Little Haiti earlier today and saw the cow’s feet stacked in the butcher’s refrigerated window, I passed. I know cow’s foot is a Caribbean staple, but no thank you. Pig’s foot, ah, that’s a different story. More on that in a later post.

Caribbean meats and produce overlap the “soul food” of the traditional African-American menu for obvious historical reasons. But they also overlap the cuisine of European peasantry — a whole chapter of the classic picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes is devoted to the devouring of a cow’s foot, by the extremely poor characters. Which brings me to oxtail.

It is my favorite part of the steer. I have been eating it all my life, in the well-known, in our city’s Cuban restaurants, rabo encendido — parenthetically, since Cubans seldom eat anything laced with chilies, our rabo is very mildy encendido, if at all. Looking through cookbooks, I found much tastier versions from Italy, France, Spain. A fascinating version comes from France’s Camargue region, a cattle area where the traditional dress is Andalusian riding clothes and fighting bulls are raised. In Spain, oxtail is called rabo de toro, giving the bull the honor of its virility, and, indeed, the dish can be made from the tails of bulls killed in the ring. In la Camargue, it’s called taureau, which is toro spelled in French and pronounced with a soft French “r.”

The Caribbean islands are oxtail country. It’s a staple of Haiti and the West Indies, and since the market where I bought it was more Caribbean than Latino I looked up a Jamaican oxtail recipe. I just cooked it and will eat it for dinner.

The market also carried some healthy looking collards, another item that overlaps the American South, the Afro-Caribbean nations and Spain, where my maternal grandmother came from and from whom I developed a taste for greens. Honoring her, I boiled the greens with a chunk of serrano ham bone — I boiled the bone, which had plenty of ham stuck to it, for a couple of hours before dropping in the greens so the otherwise dry ham would fall off it. Call it Spanish soul food.

The butcher’s window also held a big stack of goat heads — cured by smoking or salting or both, I’m not sure. That crossed some funk line for me. But next time I am buying some of the rest of the goat to make . . . Cuban chilindrón de chivo, Dominican chivo guisado, or perhaps, sticking with the Caribbean theme, a Jamaican/Trinidadian goat curry, which is one of the tastiest dishes I’ve ever had, enriched with coconut milk.

Food is, indeed, culture. And in our multicultural city, it is many cultures, as many as a kitchen can make and a palate can enjoy.

A blog post by Emma Zinsky is making the rounds of those of us who are on Cuba email lists. Zinsky is of Cuban parents and she reports on her travel to the island, something she vows never to do again, so distressed was she at what she saw. Most of it is to be expected — Cubans who are either foreign born or have lived most of their lives outside have either very exciting or very distressing responses to their viaje a la semilla.

The post strikes a note that has been struck many times before in different contexts. Zinksy dismisses famous Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez as “a branch of the government structure” and says there is no contestatorio (a difficult word to translate though important in the Cuban context since it means “talking back”) blogging in the island.

This reaction to Yoani’s Generation Y blog, which has won prestigious awards and is considered by many the true voice of Cubans who are neither Castroites nor dissident, i.e. the majority, was to be expected. You get famous, you get dissed. But there is a serious issue here.

Zinksy sees her, as well as much of the Cuban intelligentsia, as of little consequence in a real response to Cuba’s reality. We’ve heard that from the exiles about, say, singer/songwriter Carlos Varela, and even about famous dissidents who manage not to end up in jail.

Curiously, this phenomenon was first identified, though not about Cuba, by a famous Marxist, Herbert Marcuse, an icon of the ’60’s New Left. He called it “repressive tolerance.” The point is that a repressive system tolerates certain dissent as long as it really doesn’t rock the boat. Exiles who rail about this claim such borderline dissidents as Yoani and Varela serve a useful propaganda tool. See, we’re not so repressive. We allow this freedom of critical speech. Everybody else, to the calaboose!

The argument has a point. But so does the counter-argument that these contestario phenomena foster an unrest that may eventually lead to change. Eastern Communism fell without a bloody counterrevolution. It did so for many reasons, one of them was that many young people were no longer fearing repression. And that land had a history of freedom-spousing folksingers, writers and poets. Yeah, it took a long time. And, yeah, Cuba sure is taking its own sweet time. But those times they are a-changing, as times always do, even if at a deliberate pace.

Art and politics are not independent of one another, as some idealists claim. But their relationship is not simplistically linked either. Do critics of the Cuban system who write between the lines to protect their ass promote of forestall change? Do they make more of a difference when they go into exile and let it all hang out? One could say that the former haven’t made any difference yet. But one could also say that the latter get lost in the deafening exile discourse that is often dismissed as noise.

And so it stands. Marxists have a word for this, which is why even anti-Communists, if they’re smart, should not dismiss Marxist tools. Dialectics. Yin and Yang. Two sides of the coin. It’s spinning in the air. How it will land only God and the orishas know.

I can’t write about this. To begin with, those who know flamenco really know it and I’m not one of them. Anyone can enjoy it, but opining is another matter. So I won’t pretend I really know a bulerías or can discern one school of dancing from another. Let me just say that if the Gala Flamenca that opened the Flamenco Festival at the Arsht Center had been more intense I would’ve had a heart attack. Maybe I did and don’t know it yet. Besides I wouldn’t know how to begin. With Rocío Molina, sure, who opened the show with an extended set that ended with her dancing inside a kind of upside-down shallow crate so she had four wooden surfaces besides the floor to smack with her shoes, cinco tablaos. So when Belén López followed her act she didn’t bother to ease into it but simply exploded and kept exploding through her whole performance.

And that Manuel Linán is sinewy as a serpent, though I’d be hard pressed to say if more so than Rocío Molina’s male dancers. Each dancer was better than the last, or am I imagining that? I am. Each dancer was as good as a dancer could get. By the time Pastora Galván hit the boards, I wondered what she’d do. She walked in, as so many of the dancers and singers did, just walked in — some actually sauntered — as if we weren’t watching, as if she were doing it just for herself, which is how it works, flamenco is artists working it out for themselves and perhaps each other, and that we are watching is but a detail. Galván walked in looking pissed off, which is the standard flamenco attitude, and then danced, well, it was unbelievable.

All of it was. I’d never seen flamenco dancers do moves like they did. In fact, I’d never seen anyone make those moves. Flamenco, the folk art of Southern Spain, the gypsy-rooted music that seemed once threatened to become a tourist attraction, so much so that some Spaniards despise it, flamenco just keeps getting better. Don’t take my word for it. Go catch the rest of the festival.

But don’t go to be entertained, though you will feel satisfied. Go see archetypes of male and female and then those archetypes subverted. Go hear a song so deep that you feel it — and this is no figure of speech — in your heart, not the romantic St. Valentine’s heart, but the muscle in your chest that pumps and sometimes needs to be opened by surgery or singing.

This art is serious, even though, yes, one or two pieces lightened up (whew!) and were fun. But mostly it’s serious as giving birth, as dying, as killing. There is little gentleness though there is some mischievousness.

In any case, I didn’t go for a good time, or even, as I now realize, to write anything cogent. Yo vine aquí a llorar y enfermarme – I came here to weep and be ill.

Miami loves flamenco. We’ve had tablaos (flamenco bars) since we’ve had Spanish restaurants, and every day it seems like another one of the latter is announcing nights of the former. Our flamencophilia is uneven, it’s true; this is not a city of purists but of entertainment lovers. But we do like quality and we get it. Every year the Arsht Center puts on a Flamenco Festival that is as good as it gets.

The Festival, now in its third year, kicks off with a Gala Flamenca on Saturday, February 13, that introduces young stars Rocío Molina, Pastora Galván, Manuel Liñán and Belén López. The Festival runs February 13-18.

Other nights will feature the Compañía Rocío Molina and the Compañía María Pagés. The Festival promises a fine balance between the purity of tradition, much valued among flamenco aficionados, and bold new directions. Too much of what passes for flamenco is, as Paco de Lucía would say, “flamenco lite.” This is not what will grace the stage of Knight Concert Hall at the Arsht Center.

Expect intensity. Which in flamenco is, or should be, a given.

Tickets and information at www.arshtcenter.org.

I will admit that until not that long ago all I knew of two-piano music were the over-the-top instrumental hits of Ferrante and Teicher, an admission that will also date me. But Miami opened my eyes, for this is the home of the most important two-piano competition ever, the Dranoff International Two-Piano Competition and of its sponsor, the Dranoff Foundation.

Next competition is May, 2011. But there’s two-piano music right now. On Thursday, February 11 the Dranoff presents Two Pianos and the Music of Italy, with the Trivella Duo and the Bergonzi Quartet. At the University of Miami’s Gusman Hall, 1314 Miller Drive, Coral Gables. 7:30 p.m.

Tickets are $30, free for students with ID. VIP tickets for $50 get you into a reception for the artists. Online tickets at www.dranoff2piano.org.

That Los Van Van performed in Miami without more than the usual protests should come as no surprise. Over ten years ago, their first Miami concert drew massive numbers of exile protesters and things got ugly. Now, it’s the usual suspects waving flags and calling people Communists. Miami business as usual. A similar, though less heated, objection had met jazz pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba in his first Miami gig; a few years later, he performed without a whisper of protest and was lionized by exile music lovers.

Still, I didn’t go hear Los Van Van. I should say, and I do so more in the spirit of confession than disclosure, that I’ve been a fan. Serious enough to have written the liner notes for their first U.S. release, the CD Songo. I had all their music and would get together in NY with other Cuban-music aficionados for nights of what we called “Team Cuba”, partying to timba, as contemporary Cuban music was known at the time. In fact, I titled my liner notes “Team Cuba.”

But by this past weekend I was a fan no longer. The Juanes concert did it. I should say that I know Juanes, think he’s a great artist and have thought his performing in Cuba was just fine, if for no other reason than he should play wherever the hell he wants. And I also think the idea of the concert, as that of any concert, was just fine too.

I saw it on local TV, where it played sandwiched between interviews with local personalities who critiqued the Cuban regime and its relationship to artists. Frankly, I think those bits were but a pretext for broadcasting a concert that many in Miami wanted to see, but was too politically incorrect to play straight no chaser. Still, I also know some of those personalities and, in truth, their comments were not wrong.

What was wrong was Los Van Van themselves. They sounded old, tired. The enthusiasm seemed forced. There was an air of posturing. Yeah, I know, we are all Cubans, we are all one. God knows I have written and published those words more than once.

Years ago.

Now I’m fed up. Been so for a good long while. Over a decade ago, I was in Havana chatting with a Cuban journalist — not a dissident journalist or an independent journalist, just a journalist — and I told him, “this impasse has been going on so long that I’m ready to join the Cuban-American National Foundation or the Communist Party, I don’t care which.” “Total [same thing]“, he said. “Two reactionary political organizations.”

That was then. Now I’m even beyond that. Change is coming. It’s just around the corner. Yeah, sure. Christ, I’m no anti-fidelista (when asked, whenever I went on assignment to Cuba, if I had interviewed Fidel, I’d reply, Fidel and I have an agreement, I don’t get involved in his life, he doesn’t get involved in mine), but how long, Virgin of Charity, sacred Ochún, how long?

And how long can I listen to Los Van Van tell me to “Muévete” when no one’s moving. But it’s not politics, as many who defend Cuban music from Cuba, including myself, have always said. It’s music. They just didn’t sound good. Their revolutionary groove, once dismissed in Cuba as “rock and roll”, was no longer au courant. And nothing grows old faster than a revolution, political, cultural, whatever.

So the writer who once said Los Van Van were the greatest band in the world — not that anyone cares what I think — doesn’t thinks so any more. Maybe I, like the revolutions, like the world, which also revolves, like Los Van Van, have grown old.

Let them play in Miami. Let all Miami artists play in Havana. Let’s get it on. But don’t count on our old Team Cuba to be there.