Cortadito. Enrique Fernández

to the Cuban countryside: a group of guajiros (Cuban peasants) on horseback, each carrying off a sexy half-caste young woman. There is no violation in this “rape,” which in this case means abduction, for though the men are bursting with machismo, the ladies are themselves bursting with wantonness. Even the horses’ expressions show arousal. And, yes, there seems to be an enveloping gauze of sugar-sweet brushstrokes that flow among the figures, all wrapped in and enraptured by a molasses-thick gozadera.

      The verb gozar means to enjoy. It is often used in a sexual context, no more so than in a religious poem by the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St. Theresa of Avila in which she longs to “enjoy” her Lord. A shameless eroticism is the key metaphor for mystical union in the language of St. Theresa and her fellow poet and person of the cloth, St. John of the Cloth. So shameless that one can read them as sexy love poets. And here is the crux of the matter. A Spanish tradition, already “Creolized” by the fusion of Arabic, Jewish, and Christian poetic languages, migrates to the New World. It’s already a tradition in which the pleasures of the table, the bed, and the soul are indistinguishable from one another. Add to that mix the rich juices that flow from Native American and African attitudes and you get, to use culinary metaphor, a very tasty gumbo. An attitude toward food and sex and divinity that says laisser les bons temps rouler.