Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Andy Garcia

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

Actor Andy Garcia is someone who loves everything about food. Cooking it, shopping for it, talking about it. And that might be a surprise to some, because Andy Garcia is more known for his roles in iconic films such as The Untouchables, When a Man Loves a Woman, Ocean's 11 and, of course, The Godfather Part III. But Andy was born into a different life and a different culture in Havana, Cuba. His family escaped Fidel Castro's regime with Andy and his two siblings in tow to join a community of Cuban exiles in Miami. It was in Florida that Andy first remembers falling in love with his native Cuban cuisine, often cooked by his grandmother. Andy discusses all of that, as well as his Cuban-inspired chicken fricassee that he makes when he is looking for that special taste of home. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

That early kitchen, Mama's kitchen was fried spam with a little bit of sugar and an egg, powdered eggs and rice, you know, the basics. But of course, you know, as time passed, then that began to change a little bit. And it really began to change when my grandmother on my mother's side and my grandfather came about four or five years later. Everything that my mother knew about cooking came from her mother. She was the real chef. My mother was a good cook, but the grandmother was, she was a shit, you know.

Welcome to your mama's kitchen. The podcast that explores how we're shaped as adults by the kitchens we grew up in as kids. I'm Michele Norris. In today's episode we're talking to someone who loves everything about food, cooking it, shopping for it, talking about it, and that might be a bit of a surprise because most of us know Andy Garcia more as an actor than a chef. If you've been to the movies in the last 40 years, you've seen Andy Garcia in a slew of iconic films, The Untouchables, when a man loves a woman, Hoodlum,

Hero, Oceans 11, 12 and 13, and of course, The Godfather III. He was nominated for an Academy Award for that one. Andy Garcia's role as a family man is even more important to him. He's been married for more than 40 years, and he and his wife have three daughters and a son, all adults now, and they all love spending time in the kitchen when they're together. But of course, that's not where the story begins. Andy was born into a different life and a different culture,

in Havana, Cuba. His family escaped Fidel Castro's regime with Andy and his two siblings in tow to join a community of Cuban exiles in Miami. It wasn't Florida that Andy first remembers falling in love with his native Cuban cuisine, often cooked by his grandmother while his own parents were out working,

taking odd jobs to make ends meet, and eventually becoming successful entrepreneurs in their adopted country. The kitchen was Andy's favorite room. There was music on the radio, conversation at the table, and something delicious, always simmering on the stove. That room obviously left a strong impression, because as I quickly

learned, Andy Garcia knows his way around the kitchen. The man has skills. His version of Cuban-inspired chicken fricacy is something you can almost taste as you hear him describe it. Food for Andy is a bridge to a world his family left behind. And we hear about his journey as an immigrant, an actor, and a family man. All that and a lot more in today's episode, so let's get cooking. Andy Garcia, I'm so glad you're with us. Thank you. I'm excited for this conversation.

I've always wanted to talk to you. I'm glad we can do it and have a conversation about food. If you mention food, I'll be there. I'm kind of like that too. You don't have to call me twice. I will be there. Well, this is a podcast where we always begin with a simple question. Tell me about your mom's kitchen. But when I ask you that question, I wonder if your mind goes to your mom's kitchen in Miami, or if you could actually remember her kitchen in Cuba. I guess I remember it from stories. It was always five years old when I left. I remember more sort of what we call exile in Miami Beach. When we arrived from Cuba in 61, we were able to get this little efficiency

motel that you pay by the week or by the day. And they have all these little motels that are sort of shaped like in a U, their one story, and there's a little courtyard in the middle. And these efficiencies were sort of designed for the northerners to come down for a week and be able to walk across the street to the public beach. And they are basically like a suite.

Do you have a little living room, a bedroom, and a little kitchenette area? And we were there. We got to that efficiency because, you know, when we came because of the situation in Cuba and the revolution or that, when you left Cuba, they already had taken everything from you. Your businesses, your house. And you couldn't really take anything out because they had changed the monetary standards and they had taken whatever money you had. So, we borrowed a dime. When I say, we, I did it. My mother borrowed a dime in the airport to call her brother who was already there, living

nearby this efficiency. Wait, wait, wait. Your parents arrived and they literally had to borrow a dime from someone to call a family member. Yes. Yeah. And so we came first with my mother, my father came about a month and a half or two months later. And one of the things that happened during that time there was a thing called the Cuban Refugee Program. You would go to the Freedom Tower in downtown Miami area and you would get rations, not stamps, but physical food rations. So you would get, it was like military rations, you would get powdered eggs, very large can of spam,

a very large block of pavita cheese, rice, I believe peanut butter. And that was pretty much a staple for a while, you know? Father finally came and was able to get the first job available. He went to work at the Founder Hotel and the Genitorial Services. And then kept moving up the ladder, you know?

Like many exiles with their family. There were doctors, but they just took the first job available. There was no time to say, I'm a lawyer. First of all, you can't be a lawyer in America. You have to pass the bar. And so you just go to work and you begin the process of providing for your family.

And so that early kitchen, Mama's kitchen was, you know, fried spam with a little bit of sugar and eggs, powdered eggs and rice, you know, the basics. But of course, you know, it's time passed. Then that began to change a little bit. And it really began to change when my grandmother on my mother's side and my grandfather came about four or five years later. And everything that my mother knew about cooking came from her mother.

She was the real chef. My mother was a good cook, but the grandmother was, she was a shit, you know. And because both my mother and father worked, it was my grandmother who was at home, who was already in her early 80s. She was the one that cooked, and I would watch her cook. You know, I could see the things

that she would do on a daily basis and things. She would put together. There was a word, you know, apron strings. Yeah, that's right. You're looking up at her as she's cooking. And every so often, like my dogs, when you eat and they come and scratch out your legs, you see if something drops on the floor. So you're kind of around her also going like, like a little bird in a nest, you know, you

getting thrown scraps. But you're up open now. Yeah, you're getting thrown scraps. But you got to taste the things. All the time. All the time. All the time. All the time. All the time. All the time.

Was that, does that describe your relationship to the kitchen? Absolutely. Yes. Is there one kitchen in particular when you go back in your mind that you can picture? And if so, take me there. Help me see it.

Close your eyes and describe it for me. What did it look like? What was going on at the stove? What was going on at it look like? What was going on at the stove? What was going on at the kitchen table? What was going on outside the window? When we finally had sort of a kitchen big enough to actually move around it, you know, because we were always cooking for a family of six of us

and then the other grandparents came and then became eight of us. So once that happened, we were cooking. Like I said, my grandmother did most of the cooking because both my parents worked at that time. And when I'd come home from school, she'd be at it. You know, so I'd go to the kitchen and then wait, who would be at it? No, grandma. Mom was working all the time. My mother was an English teacher in Cuba and she got a secretaryal job during those years. And then later on, she went to work with my father because his whole sale business started to grow. And she just went to work in the family business.

And you said when you got home from school, your grandma would be at it. What would she be doing in the kitchen? She'd be preparing the stew. You're preparing the recipe for that night. I'm cooking. You know, you immediately obviously gravitate towards the kitchen when you smell that stuff. And you go, hey, you give her a kiss. What are you doing, what are we having for dinner, what are you cooking? And then, you know, and she let me taste it or I would help her or we just watch her.

And then I'd run to the park, which is across the street and go play ball, you know. And then we'd all have dinner together at night, you know, when my parents got home. Isn't that a beautiful thing to walk in a house and beautiful, wonderful, delicious smells are coming out of the kitchen? Oh, it's amazing. It's amazing. There's nothing like it.

There's nothing like it. Yeah. The curious thing was that one of the jobs that my father ended up doing, he got a job managing a catering company and what we call the Cantina. And this is a thing where I'm not sure if you've ever been witness to this, but again, this is the early 60s. You would sign up, let's say as your family

and you would order on a weekly basis for food to be delivered to you when you got home because you were working in your kid, you know. So the cantina was like, almost like those military tins, so they would stack on top of each other. There's a, you see them in India a lot. Yeah. Trying to remember the name of those, yes.

They slide down. Tiffin. Yeah, and they slide down these two rails, and they stack up against each other, and they're all about maybe like eight inches in circumference or something like that. And so you'd have the soup on the bottom or the black beans and the first tin,

and then the rice, and then the meat that you would order where there'd be picadillo or robovierja and then fried bananas. And then I think maybe a dessert on top or something like that. And that would be left at your house. This sounds like a great, wait, this sounds like a great idea. I mean, I would do this today

if someone was doing this. Yeah. That sounds delicious. And you would fill out, you know, what do you want on Tuesday, what do you want on Wednesday? And they give you options like the meat on Wednesday would either be like, because they eat up a beer, or pork, or chicken, or a fricacy, you know,

and you would fill out your weekly thing and this would be delivered every day. Now my father worked for this gentleman for a while and then eventually bought the company. It was called Beatriz, as in the town in France. And we did that for a while and you know and he would bring you, you couldn't keep the food an extra day there. So whatever was like leftover, he would bring home and give it to the local families that needed food that you know maybe couldn't even afford at the time.

You know, so he would bring would bring those leftovers home to everybody. And anyway, we did that for a while. So we weren't so much cooking, so much at home because everybody was working. Even my brother who was a time in the early 60s, he was like, he's six years old to the Meyah Renee. He was working, he was 11 years old. He would go to, before going to junior high,

he would get up in the morning and go to the sterling hotel at Miami Beach and the carol honor of the Doveville. But mostly he worked at the sterling. And he would work for a gentleman by the name of Murth the Surf, who's a notorious individual. It was a jewel thief and brought surfing to South Florida. He worked for a Merf the Surf. Yeah, you're aware who Merf the Surf is? Yes, I've heard of Merf the Surf. There's a whole documentary about Merf the Surf. He worked for Merf the Surf.

What did he do for him? He had the concession of all the pools there in the Caroline and the Doveville and the Sterling, the role group, a hotel there. And he would go there in the morning and throw out all the cushions on all the chase lounges and then go to school and then come back after school and work the morning and throw out all the cushions on all the chase lounges and then go to school and then come back after school and work the afternoon and then bring them all in in the end of the day and then work the weekends. And he would bring me on the weekends because there are those pools and those hotels in

those days were magnificent, you know, the four diving boards and it was just so beautiful. And I will go with him on the weekends and pick up the cigarette and buds off the, you know, that little thing you push down and the screw pulp and then you sweep it in there. Yes, boy, that's a memory, isn't it? And they were everywhere for a while because everybody smoked. Yeah, and then I would, you know, in exchange I'd get a cheeseburger and I was able to swim in the pool all day, you know, in exchange I'd get a cheeseburger and I was able to swim in the pool all day, you know. And go and go to the beach. So it was a great time, really. I'm like, I got sidetracked.

Anyway, so anyway, everybody was working. So the container became an important part of everyone's life and exile. Music A curious thing about food is that it brings back very particular memories. Taste, smell, induces this kind of nostalgic times in your life that hopefully are positive, you know. Yeah, but that's got to be complicated for you and your family because as much as you

love Cuban food, I wonder, particularly for your parents, if they tasted sadness when they ate that food, if it was a connection to something that was yanked from them. Well, it was. All the exiles that came at that time period came with the hope of going back. They had that hope. They believed that that regime could not last. People who came, you know, 15 years later, they, by then everyone's going, well, this thing is not going anywhere, you know, this is a mess. And what are you going to go back to?

I think privately everybody had that deep nostalgia of sadness for what went down and would pray for those who were there who were suffering and they would pray for a change. All that's going on. But I've never saw it deter their appetite for life and for family or getting the way of their work ethic. But of course, then after dinner, people would gather and smoke and talk about, as you can imagine Cuba. Yeah, yeah.

And what was going on, and hey, I heard this is going on, is like, is that a crack in the veneers? Is that gonna be the thing that takes him down? And people were connected. And of course, in those days, in the early 60s, you had the situation with the Bay of Pigs. We were in Cuba during that time.

I was in Havana. During the Bay of Pigs, I was literally under a bed as the people were firing. And the next day I went out and collected all these empty shells that were, you know. You're kidding. Yeah. But then later on, you had the missile crisis.

We were in America at that point. But there was always something going on, you know, like a little glimmer of hope that something might take this regime down. But unfortunately, it's been now 64 years. You were a little boy under your bed during the Bay of Pigs. Yeah. And you can still remember that, the sound of that.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because they were strafing, you know, they were anti-acraft gunfire in Havana going up and we heard it all. And to this day, I can feel the tarazo floor on my cheek. Is that something that you've had to work through? Because that's trauma. That's a tough memory to... No, I choose not to work through it. You want to remember it.

Oh, yeah, that's who I am. Yeah. And you want to remember what it represents. Yeah, and honor it, you know. And we appreciate it, I would say. And we still do. The embrace that America gave us and the opportunity to pursue our dreams freely without any kind of oppression or indoctrination.

We had the freedom of speech not to say that America is the perfect place. It's not just things that are perfect place. But compared to most places, it's pretty perfect, you know, kind of thing. And everybody has different experiences and the country grows hopefully every day in a better direction, we're making better decisions and acknowledging our flaws and our past and not repeating them. But in general, it is still a place where you can make choices, speak freely. And that's an important thing, you know, that you have choice, you can vote, you know, you can criticize and you won't be put in jail. That's something you never take for granted. No, absolutely not. Having heard what you grew up, stories you grew up with.

Yeah, I mean, if it wasn't for the journey and the courage that my parents had to leave, you know, start a new somewhere. I think of myself that I had to leave at the age of 45 with young children and had to move to somewhere where I didn't know the language and had to start a life. How I do imagine, isn't it? Yeah, with nothing, you know, that's a very courageous thing. And if it wasn't for that courage, I wouldn't be here talking to you right now.

You wouldn't care what my mama's kitchen was, you know what I'm saying? But your archive your life would have been different. To be sure. You're listening to the audible original, your mom is kitchen. Like what you're hearing, the next episode is available now, exclusively from Audible. You can listen to new episodes on Audible two weeks before you can hear them anywhere else. You have ever been there when an uncomfortable question about race comes up, but you don't know how to answer? That's where CodeSwitch lives.

Each week we're talking about race and how it intersects with every other aspect of your life, from politics and pop culture to history and food. Listen now to the Codeswitch Podcast from NPR. When you decided to become an actor, I bet there were some interesting conversations at the dining room table, maybe at the kitchen table with your family about that choice. What do they have to say about that?

Why? Why? Was that why? Why? What did they want you to have to do instead? Well, we had a family business that was flourishing at that point, you know, and I was very involved with. I grew up in it.

And what was the family business? Well, there was many things that led up to this new phase of it, which was the fragrance business, importing fragrances. And I was very much part of that with my brother and my father that began that. And at that time, I finished college and decided to continue to pursue my interest in acting. So they come from a generation, not so much my brother, but we don't have any people in the entertainment business. So to even think about how do you make a living as an actor,

I could imagine my father would think, you know, an actor that's Clark Gable and, you know, Humphrey Bogart and, you know, I love my son, but he's not Humphrey Bogart, you know. That I could imagine the whole thing, those worries. And I know he did worry. His main concern was don't get lost in it. You know, you know, that I could imagine that all of those worries. And I know he did worry. His main concern was don't get lost in it. You know, you have a great opportunity here with his business. Don't get lost in it. You know, you can have a great future here

that you worked hard for. Don't lose yourself in something that's kind of like impossible to attain, I guess, in his eyes, you know. He was worried about the long game. Yeah. And opposed to my mother mother who would say, and this goes to tribute to her character, he would say, hey, let him fly. He's got to fly on his own, he's got to fly, he got to let him go. Would she say that to you in front of your dad

or would she pull you aside and say, listen. Well, no, she said that to him for sure many times because he would be the one with more concern and she would say like if you break a wing, come back, heal, and then if you need to go fly again, go ahead. But she said to him, you gotta let him go. Let him go. And she was persuasive. He wasn't prohibiting me from going.

He was just very concerned. And later on, friends of his would come to me and say, Oh, you're dead. You know, you know, he would come to me and, you know, very concerned for you because he was, you know, he had no, they had no concept of how you even make a living as an actor, you know, they, that was so far into them, you know. Well, I understand that. It was foreign to me, and I wanted to be an actor. Because there are so many ways to do it and the criticism and I'm sure he was concerned about you know, how you would create a life. Yeah, exactly. I understand that. Although he had seen me on stage, it wasn't like he thought I didn't have talent or anything like that or that he was not

he understood that I had a real passion for it, but he was just concerned. As any parent would be, you know. Where did that interest in acting come from? Were you always a tada kid, someone who was always performing at the table or was there a particular film or a TV show that you saw that made you think, I want to do that? I mean, I made me, my principal would say that as a kid, I would sing and dance, and I would, that's really every kid.

But I wasn't like a song and dance man, right? I thought it was always interesting. Music all my life. And you were an athlete. I was an athlete. That was my focus. But it was my focus. Although I was enamored with film,

I would go to the movies all the time and sit through movies and all day long. And you know, go see a film like in a double bill, especially in the summers in Lincoln Road, they had a lot of double bills, James Bond movies or, you know, the Cruz Empire Adventure movie Steve McQueen, you know, Bird Lancaster, Earl Flynn, John Connery, all these kind of action heroes, you know, at the time, action adventure heroes. And I would just go all day long, I'd go there, started the matinee at noon and leave at eight o'clock a night,

never leave the theater. So I had a, that was inside of me. And I was enamored with, we get lost in it as we all do. But maybe perhaps I had even a deeper connection to it. That was that eventually grabbed me and picked me and said, this is what you need to be doing. So I want a picture of what it was like for you when you came home and your acting career had taken off.

And you had done the untouchables and you had done when a man loves a woman and you go back home where they're horns and confetti or was it, because sometimes when you go home after something like that, they're like bringing you back down to earth. No, no, no. It was very... It was sort of the same dynamic. They were very proud.

Obviously, I took my mother and father to the Oscars when I was nominated for the Godfather Part III, and he sat there with me. He was already, you know, dealing with an illness that eventually took him down, but he was very proud, sat there in the second row because I was nominated with me. He was very proud and relieved, you know, I'm sure. You know, and he would always, as a conservative business man, you know, he'd always want to know, every time I got a job, he would, you know,

kind of rub his fingers together, like say, how much, how much? And I would never tell him, I never tell him how much. I said, I'm okay with that, don't worry about it. I'm doing good. I got my kids to take care of the family, don't worry about it. And then he'd even not go, but how much, but how much? And so finally, at one time, I told him when he was very old

and the hospital, he really wanted to know what, and I finally, because sometimes, you don't want to share with someone, you know, that they're paying you X amount of money that for a month, 30 days of work, that it took them a year or three years to make, you know, so I didn't ever wanted to give them that perspective other than I'm okay, everything's cool. I don't know what you're going to worry about, I think. I'm good. And he understood, you know, he didn't relish as did my mother, the idea that all their kids, my brother and my sister, were very successful in that sense in their own field.

So they were very proud. And because I was more sort of like in the limelight celebrity kind of thing, then they could play around in that sense of, I was always, it will always be their son, but they would go around and say, his father, you know, kind of things. So. Remember when I told you at the top of the episode that Andy Garcia loves talking about food? You might be thinking, well, wait a minute,

we haven't heard him say that much about food yet, but that's because we've saved the tastiest bits of that conversation for this part of the podcast. And it took a deep dive into the world of Cuban cuisine describing some of his favorite traditional dishes. Because of you, which is like a meat hash. And techniques.

It makes that all together, you know, sort of like a Cuban carbonara dish, you know, and Ingredients, eggs and sweet bananas, you know, fried banana. He went on and on. I could barely stop it. When you slice the onion, Don't slice them so thin that they'll just break apart on it. You know, keep them. He talked all about his process. It was like being in a classroom. I learned new words. We call mores and Christians, or Gongri, which is basically, you make the black beans and then you cook the rice inside the beans. New techniques.

Classic thing is not with the crackers with the Cuban bread that's pressed, you know, in a press and then you dip the bread in the coffee. New expressions. I don't know if I've ever had, which is like a shredded, it's called old clothes. It's like a shredded flank steak that you all close. And basically it's like a flank steak.

I mean, it's clear listening to him that he can throw down in the kitchen. In many different ways, he were either in an open pit or in chunks fried in those days. See, I told you, he's still talking about food. Not a great habit to be waking up in the morning to a baguette of bread and butter and coffee and news. Don't you want to go eat at his house after listening to all this?

I just love to cook and appreciate it. And then it's very therapeutic, as you know, to sit and cook and have a glass of wine and watch a little football and cook some more, you know, and spend the day just doing that. As Andy explains, traditional Cuban cooking can resemble rustic country food, hearty dishes centered around native vegetables, rice, beans, and basic proteins like chicken and pork.

And because most of these dishes derive from betotranian and Spanish cultures, more than, say, of Mexican or Central and South American cuisine, they also don't include some of the heat you might expect. But that doesn't make Cuban cuisine flat, not in the least. These dishes are built around complex flavors and techniques. They cook for a long time, and so the flavors are almost layered. And the result is meals that, as I listen to talk about them, well, make your mouth water.

So given all of that, I couldn't wait to hear about Andy Garcia's favorite Cuban dish that he makes when he's looking for that special taste of home. And I have a couple of dishes that I like to, my sort of go to that I choose to do when I get those cravings. Like what, what are those dishes? Well, chicken fricacy is one of my favorite ones I make. And there's an offshoot of that, which is a chicken and rice, but I like it the fricacy the best for some reason, you know.

Now, tell me about the chicken fricacy. What's in it, how do you prepare it? Well, I only use dark meat, first of all. Thighs. Thighs. Some people will use boneless thighs and skinless if you don't want skin, you know, but I use a bone in with skin. More flavor.

Yeah. First of all, most important is that overnight you marinate the chicken in a glass container or in a huge ziplock if you'd like. You do a marinade of half lime juice and orange juice, like a cup of each, and put all your onions, like for eight or 10 people to use like three onions, but white or Spanish on your not the purple onion. Garlic, a bunch of garlic cloves, and eight, 10 cloves, and chop them up, rub the chicken in them,

you know, a little pepper, and the lime orange juice mixture. And you marinate the chicken and leave it overnight. And then basically you brown the chicken first, you brown it, then set it aside. And then you do a saute of onions, green yellow orange, yellow peppers, all sweet, nothing spicy. Cuban food, there's nothing hot, you know, in Cuban food or in Spanish food.

People think, why don't you like spicy or Cuban? And I explain this all the time. I said, no, we don't eat jalapenos or hot sauce and that kind of stuff. So anyways, you saute the onions, the garlic, and you put some dry cherry wine, a good cherry, like a high, the more top shelf, the better. Not just a cooking wine, but a good Spanish sherry dry.

So it gets in the onions and it just kind of burns off. Then you throw all the marinade, all the onions and peppers in the bowl that you would... In the pan that you would do to take it. In the pan you were doing the chicken. And that pan already has a crust, a little bit of a thing, and then you'd add a citted of the orange stuff, will deglaze the pan. And you start getting this kind of, you know, citric rue kind of thing going on. I'm smelling this, it sounds so delicious.

And then you cook the onions down, not all the way, just enough to maybe, you're not trying to caramelize them, but you saw Tim break them down, then you put tomato paste, couple of little cans of that, and you put raisins, a couple of little cans of that and you put raisins, green olives, capers, and then you kind of stir all that together once that gets

going, you throw the chicken back in. And then you stir fry that chicken in there for a little bit, to get it all together and then you put water in there to cover the chicken for a long time. So then you go on a medium load, you know things things are just a little bit of a bubble going on. And at the end before you serve it, you put green peas in there. So you don't get mushy, right? And then you make a white rice on the side, and then you make very ripe plantains.

You know, when they have to be like black, you know, the black are the better. And then you slice that and you cook that in a vegetable oil, you fry them up. So you have white rice, the fricacy next to it, and the plantain. And then a typical salad would be sliced avocados with very thinly sliced onion. Those two ingredients with extra virgin olive oil, and I like the psalmig vinegar.

You can just use a red wine vinegar. You can use plain vinegar. You can just use lemon. Just a splash on top of that. And the other will look black pepper, a little salt, and that's vinegar, you can use plain vinegar, you can just use lemon. Just a splash on top of that. And the other little black pepper, a little salt, and that's it, you know. So that dish is kind of a go-to dish of mine, and I make enough of it where I mean like day three. And it probably gets better with every day.

Oh, amazing. As you know, you know, the sauce is anything that's, it's sauce-based, casserole-based, the next day, and two days after, whether it's a ragu or anything, it's a totally different thing. So you have thoroughly tortured us, listening to this. Yeah. It sounds so good.

Ha-ha-ha. When you live in a family that is in exile, does the kitchen provide a space for a particular kind of victory? Can you live in a family that is in exile? Does the kitchen provide a space for a particular kind of victory that you can hold on to something that was taken from you, that you can continue to gather and combat the kind of brokenness that so many people experience in exile? Was the kitchen sort of a victorious space in your family. If you have the blessing to be able to get out, you know, because people were able to get out families in Cuba would suffer

tremendously to have something on their kitchen table because their life existed with a ration card. So you would have to get in line to see what your ration of milk would be for the month, or of rice, or of an egg, or whatever, and then good luck if it was even there. That's back in Cuba. For those who couldn't get out. Yeah, and they may do with what they could, but at the end of the day, I think the tradition of still eating together and trying to make do and connecting. I don't think that went away, but in terms of what was on the kitchen table, that was a struggle for them. And for us, it was of course a struggle, but you know, you can go to the grocery store and there would be things on the shelf.

And you didn't have a ration card, you can get what you could afford, let's say, right? Or like in the early days, you had the help from the refugee program where you got some rations, where at least you were able to bring some staples home and cook for your family, even though you didn't have a lot of money to go to the actual You know food fairs. I called them in South Florida and actually buy some chicken So you had a moment where you can kind of gather yourself catch a breath feed your family and and look for work and begin the process of building a new life

so I would say that when you did have the opportunity to now have sitting around a table and cooking and being proud of the fact that you have provided this meal for your family and you have, I guess, survived the constraints of an indoctrinating regime. So you know that you said, you can take everything from me, but you're not going to take my family from me. That's not going to happen. And you're not going to take my food, my traditions around that food. You're not going to take that from me.

You can take over Cuba, but you can't take over the Cuba and me, right? And I see I love talking to you. Likewise. This has been fun. Thank you. I appreciate it. I enjoy the show very much. I look forward to making your frequency.

Let me know. Send me an email. Well, let you know how it goes. Send me a picture. I will. I will. And we're going to share this recipe with our listeners. And we'll ask them to share their pictures also.

That would be great. Thank you. Thanks so much. Boarded, I love talking to Andy Garcia about his life and upbringing back in Miami Beach. The Garcia family might have had meager beginnings here in America, but their courage brought them stability and eventually success. And their strong ties to their heritage brought to life on the stove and at the kitchen table, allowed them to carry their beloved Cuba with them wherever they went.

Now, if you were as intrigued as I was, listening to Andy Garcia discuss his family's chicken fricacy recipe, you are in luck, because you can get the complete recipe right now on my Instagram page. And I have a feeling that citric savory roux will be simmering soon on some of your stoves. Share your thoughts, share your pictures. We'd love to see them. We'd love to hear about

all of it. I'm sure that that will make Andy Garcia happy to know that a piece of his culture and his heart has made its way into your homes too. Thanks so much for listening to your Mama's Kitchen. I'm Michele Norris. See you next time. We'll see how often you cook the recipe between now and then. I'm probably going to cook it this weekend. I cook the live. I might do the same because you know, it's been a while. You see, he's still talking about food, can't believe it. This has been a higher ground and audible original, produced by Higher Ground Studios.

Senior producer Natalie Ritten, producer Sonia Tun, and associate producer Angel Carreras. Sound design and engineering from Andrew Epen and Roy Baum. Higher ground audio's editorial assistants are Jenna Levin and Camilla Thertacouse. Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Fierman and me, Michele Norris. Executive producers for Audible are Zola Mashareki, Nick DiAngelo and Ann Hepperman. The show's closing song is 504 by the Soul Rebels. In a Toriel and Web support from Melissa Bear and Say What Media, special thanks this

week to Waterman Sound in Los Angeles. Head of Audible Studios, Olamashiriki, Chief Content Officer, Rachel Giazza, and that's it. Goodbye, everybody. Come back next week and until then, be Bountiful. Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio LLC. Higher Ground