Ice cream from Fidel Castro, soup from Saddam Hussein and greetings from Pol Pot: what did the dictators eat?

Four years of work cost award-winning Polish journalist Witold Szablowski to write a book published in Spanish by Oberon thanks to the testimony of the cooks that they nurtured some of the most sinister rulers in contemporary history; Some have worked with the fear of knowing that a mistake has cost them their lives, others continue to worship their late leader unabashedly.

Szablowski, who worked as a dishwasher and kitchen boy, traveled four continents show “the history of the twentieth century seen from the kitchen door”, a task strewn with pitfalls because not all those who fed the dictators are ready to speak.

Yes, Erasmo Hernández did it, who joined the Revolution and was Fidel Castro’s bodyguard before becoming his personal cook; Today, he runs the Mamá Inés restaurant in Old Havana. Her partner Flores, who lives in poverty, was not so lucky.

Thanks to Hernández, we know that Che was passionate about black beans But an ordinary soldier was never allowed to eat differently during the guerrillas, and Fidel Castro made pasta his star dish after cooking it while imprisoned for the attack on the Moncada barracks.

Castro, who liked to talk about what he knew and what he didn’t know – among his obligatory listeners were the cooks of the Hotel Habana Libre whenever he ate there – beloved ice cream; He was able to eat 20 scoops at once and had the legendary Coppelia experience with preparations made from goat, donkey and bison milk.

Your taste for dairy products led him to raise Ubre Blanca, a cow that became an emblem of the Revolution thanks to her incredible milk production, which Granma brought back daily and which made her enter Guinness, beating the United States, a symbol.

This cow ate better than the Cuban population, which television cook Nitza Villapol taught during the special period after the fall of the USSR to trade meat for fruit peels.

The Cambodian butcher

Yong Moeun was “won over by the smile” and “how handsome he was” by Pol Pot, to whom are attributed nearly two million victims in less than four years. “He was not a murderer, he was a dreamer”, defends himself the one who prepared several dishes for him every day – the pineapple and chili pepper and roast chicken soup were his favorites – so that he could choose while they ate in the punishment colonies. one hundred grams of rice at a time per day and one egg per month.

She gave him blind obedience, he saved her life on eight counts of treason. The cook who fed the Cambodian Khmer Rouge chef while his people he was trying to survive on the basis of rats and insects Today, he lives in a house with cable television where he watches football a lot because Messi’s smile reminds him of “brother Pouk”.

If the stomach aches of the Cambodian dictator soured his character, the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha –under his regime, more than 6,000 people were slaughtered and an unknown number have died in labor camps and political prisons – living on hunger and crankiness on a strict 1,200-calorie diet from diabetes and a heart attack.

Her cook, who requested anonymity for the book and now runs a small hotel with a restaurant, remembers how, when Hoxha was angry, he made a dessert with a sweetener because eat “put him in a good mood” and avoided deaths. “Who knows how many lives I’ve saved? “

In Iraq

He also does not like his boss Abu Ali, the last survivor of the six cooks of the Iraqi president from 1979 to 2003, Saddam Hussein, which he describes as “a great son of a bitch”.

He received with terror every criticism of his dishes – “He always set goals on food when he was having a bad day” – and he learned fish soup from Tikrit, the dictator’s hometown, perfectly well, because it was his favorite food.

Obsessed with an attack, the Iraqi genocide ordered daily cooking in all the palaces it built and that samples will be kept in the event of poisoning.

In a miserable house lives Otonde Odera, the cook of the former Ugandan presidents Milton Obote and Idi Amin, octogenarian. The last one would have been a cannibal, although Odera denies cooking human meat for him.

Belonging to the Lúo tribe – the same as former US President Barack Obama – and the only surviving of 13 siblings, he learned to cook food from the “mzungu” (white) working for a British couple and then did. reproduced. for the “clenched fist” Milton Obote.

He retains his post after the overthrow at the hands of Idi Amin in 1971: “When they kick in, they come on an empty stomach and then you have something good for them. they can’t kill you “.

EFE Agency

PB