CAP-HAITIEN, Haiti — In a wood-frame shack without walls on the western edges of this historic city, time stands still.
Amid the constant noise of passing motorcycles and honking car horns, dozens of Haitians are busy at work preparing a traditional staple crop the way their forebears and the island’s indigenous people did ages ago: with charred wood, artisan sieves and homemade wooden knives.
While a group of women scrapes away the outer skin of the edible root known as manioc or cassava, using nothing more than the peeled off metal tops of cans, a group of men prepares to process the tuber into flour by washing it, while a third group grates it and removes its toxic juice. The tuber’s dried, sifted flour is then spread evenly in a circular fashion onto a round, flat iron plate known as a platine, sitting on top of a large concrete slab with burning charcoal underneath.
Then comes the unique flavorings that break up the neutral, crisp taste of cassava bread and gives Haitian kasav its unique flavor and allows it to stand out from its counterparts in Amerindian and Afro-descendant communities across Latin America and the Caribbean: herring, peanut, ginger, sugar, salt, cinnamon, coconut, sweetened condensed cream, pineapple — or any combination of the above.
“We have around 11 different flavors,” Monarc Petit Benoit, the co-founder of Dope Kasav, says. “There are so many I forget.”
Staple food of nearly 1 billion people worldwide
The staple food for nearly a billion people around the world, cassava, also known as yuca, is enjoying a renaissance here thanks to its gluten and nut-free flour that is used to produce kasav or cassava bread, a popular flatbread of the region’s original Arawak population that until recently was considered poor people’s food in Haiti.
That rebirth, Benoit says, can be credited to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rising cost of wheat and other food. All have made the wheat bread a pricey luxury, and kasav, with its long-shelf life, an attractive alternative.
“It’s part of our culture and the production of cassava has been here for a long time, since the native Indians,” Benoit said.
The traditional know-how associated with the making of cassava bread is the driving force behind the country’s decision to join forces with four other Latin America and Caribbean nations — Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Venezuela — to offer the traditional cuisine to UNESCO for recognition on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Cassava’s candidacy, a collaboration that’s been two years in the making, marks the first time five countries in the hemisphere have come together to pose a multinational entry for the prestigious United Nations honor.
Their pitch? While cassava’s taste and texture may vary across the region, and its name differs (kasav in Haiti; casabe in Cuba; ereba in Honduras; pan de Venezuela, bammy in Jamaica), the “pan de los Indios” or “bread of the Indians” as it is also known in Cuba, has transcended time and national boundaries.
“It’s a much needed reminder that at a time when Haiti can feel quite isolated, that we share some of the common lineage, common heritage, common cultural background with much of the region,” Dominique Dupuy, Haiti’s ambassador and permanent delegate to UNESCO, said.
In Cuba, the tradition lives in six rural provinces across eastern and central Cuba; in Venezuela, cassava is popular among indigenous communities and the country’s African descendants; in the Dominican Republic, as in Haiti, it’s present throughout, while in Honduras, its a staple food for the Garífunas, the descendants of African slaves mixed with Carib and Arawak Indians who sought refuge in Central America after fleeing slavery and war in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Dupuy, who in 2020 successfully got Haiti’s first ever entry on UNESCO’s Intangible List with the country’s popular independence pumpkin soup, soup joumou, said a cassava inscription provides Haitians with an opportunity to expand the conversation around their country, currently undergoing one of its worst humanitarian crises along with unprecedented levels of gang violence and kidnappings.
Kasav —usually eaten with peanut butter, preferably Haiti-made with a pepper punch — is a symbol of national identity rooted in the country’s African and indigenous history that began long before the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards, before French buccaneers established a settlement on Île de la Tortue, the pirates’ lair off the country’s northwest coast, in 1625, and long before enslaved Africans rebelled to create the world’s first Black republic in 1804.
That history began centuries earlier when the original inhabitants of the island of Hispaniola, the indigenous Arawak-speaking Taínos, named the western portion Ayiti, meaning“land of high mountains.”
“In this sense, kasav is a rare witness of this tragic and critical encounter between the Taíno people and the enslaved Africans brought by force on the colony of Saint Domingue to work on plantations,” Dupuy said. “It is a witness and a testament of a decision of resilience, a decision to survive and a decision to strive.”
The Taínos’ traditional know-how of producing cassava bread was passed on to others at a key time when the indigenous population on Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere in the hemisphere was on the verge of extinction. The knowledge was absorbed by the enslaved Africans and passed on to their descendants through generations.
Investing in cassava
This history, said Benoit, along with the financial potential of the product, that led him to invest in one of the oldest cassava businesses in the northern city of Cap-Haïtien. Like the throng of people stopping by on a recent afternoon to purchase the flatbread, Benoit was a client.
He was also motivated by the shortage of wheat bread during the COVID-19 pandemic and by the idea that if done right, he could also create jobs while helping out farmers.
“Cassava from the north is the preference in the country,” said Benoit, whose training is in computers. “So I thought, why not have the cassava from Cap-Haïtien reach other regions and help the national production? The more people consume cassava, the more it will be in demand and the more jobs can be created.”
He co-founded Dope Kasav, a joint venture with Auguste Boniface Prince, a well-known cassava bread producer in the city who has been in the business for more than 30 years. A towering figure, Prince isn’t much of a talker. But he is happy, he said, when he looks at the transformation taking place.
“From time to time, I catch myself thinking, ‘How is it that Haitians have come to love cassava like this?’” Prince said. “Because in the beginning when I started, Haitians didn’t want cassava; they didn’t like it like this.”
Back then his cassava was sold mostly in markets in Port-au-Prince. But now, Prince said, “people are stopping by from all over to buy kasav. We don’t need to send it out to make a sale.”
The open-air factory in Cap-Haitien exists in similar communities in the other four countries, with a division of labor where women and men perform different tasks, and where production is a community affair.
“It’s one of the things I’ve seen Haitians make real and pass on to generations,” Prince said about cassava bread production. He also swears by its nutritional value.
“Unlike bread, it has nothing artificial in it,” he said as he walks over to one and pours a can of sweetened condensed milk on top after a worker added a mixture of ginger and coconut. “It’s made with all natural ingredients and it’s something that is good for your health.”
Josnel Pierre, 24, started working at the factory while in school and today works full-time, getting paid the equivalent of $19 a day.
“I have a wife. I have a child,” he said in between breaks. “It allows me to keep a roof over my head and make a living.”
His job to bake the bread, shaped like an oversize tortilla or pancake. Grabbing a silver basin, he scoops up flour with both hands, pours it onto the iron plate and spreads it in a circle.
As the flour starts to roast, Pierre checks on other flatbread nearby before returning and adding a mixture of ginger and coconut, which were crushed using a wooden mortar. Over the next 30 minutes — the time it takes for the cassava to brown on both sides — he pats the flour into a round flat shape, crease its edges using a wooden paddle and then turns it over with his bare hands before cutting the bread into squares with a wooden handmade knife and then removing it so it can dry before packaging.
The workshop is abuzz with activity, from the people strolling in off the street to buy kasav, wrapped in brown paper, to motorcycle drivers who pull up to drop off bags of manioc. In one corner, a group of women scraped the root while in another a second group are preserving the starch.
In the middle, young men are either grating the tuber into flour or sifting it to ensure it has no sediments and is ready to be spread onto the platine. The same technique is used by the indigenous people in the community of Masakenari, Guyana, home to the native Wai-wai people, as well as in Dominica where cassava bread is a staple among descendants of the Carib Indians.
Job generator
Since joining forces with Benoit, Prince said he’s been able to hire a number of new workers and estimates that he has anywhere from 30 to 35 people working a day in his open-air workshop, where corrugated zinc sheets protect them from the elements but not the baking heat.
The number, he said, doesn’t include the farmers across the north who grow and sell him the manioc, or the motorcycle taxi drivers who deliver the tubers by the bagloads. The area that produces the best cassava roots, he said, is the northeast which includes the villages of Caracol and Trou-du-Nord.
If the farmers had help, Prince said, they would be producing four times the amount of manioc they currently harvest.
“It’s unfortunate that we don’t have a thriving agricultural sector,” he said, “because the farmers don’t have support; they don’t really have materials to farm. They are planting with machetes in their hands.”
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