Reconnecting with Cuba on stage and table

Eduardo Machado loves green plantains. He craves yuca with lime, and Moros y Cristianos (Moors and Christians), a mixture of bacon, tomato sauce, rice and black beans.

Whenever Machado eats such dishes, he experiences the kind of memory rush that swept over Marcel Proust when he munched on a madeleine.

"I eat the food, and I really feel like I'm back in Cuba," says the Cuban-American playwright.

Food connects Machado to the land of his birth, the place he spent a mostly happy childhood until 1961. In that year, at age 8, he boarded one of the "Pedro Pan" flights that lifted 14,000 children out of Cuba, in the wake of the island's communist revolution.

Machado is still hunting down the cuisine of his early childhood. And it is a muy rico source of inspiration for the 54-year-old author.

His new book, "Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile's Hunger for Home" (Gotham Books), is a savory memoir of his life, organized around gustatory memories and favorite recipes.

And Machado's play "The Cook," now in previews at Seattle Repertory Theatre, also has a big connection with food.

"I think food is always an important part of my plays," explains Machado, the author of some 40 works, a teacher at New York University and the artistic director of INTAR Theatre in New York, an important Latino company. "Food is in all of them, but the plays are really about people."

The people who spring from the pages of "Tastes Like Cuba" (co-authored with Machado's life partner, Michael Domitrovich) are members of the writer's own family.

He was born into a well-to-do, jovial, food-loving clan. One grandmother, Concepcion (nicknamed "Cuca"), made perfect Cuban café con leche (coffee with milk). Another, Manuela, "loved to make Spanish [omelets] from the fresh eggs in the yard."

Some in the Machado clan initially supported the socialist revolution that installed Fidel Castro as Cuba's leader. But his parents quickly became bitterly disillusioned, and after sending little Eduardo and his brother to the U.S., they fled too, and settled the family in Los Angeles.

The move (and his parents' subsequent divorce) unsettled Machado. As for so many émigrés, there were jarring cultural losses — including the comfort of some favorite foods.

In L.A., he discovered that Latin cuisine meant Mexican cooking.

"My family didn't even know what a tortilla was when we got there," Machado explains. "Mexican food was exotic to us, and so different. Cuban food is a mixture of Creole, French, Spanish and African cuisines. It has its own distinctive taste."

Even on visits to Miami, which absorbed waves of Cuban expatriates, Cuban food didn't match up with Machado's memories.

"I think when Cubans went to Miami, they couldn't get all the right, fresh ingredients, and they started overspicing the dishes."

In 1999, Machado made his first trip back to Cuba. He has returned five times since then — to treat his taste buds to the real thing, but also to study the social fabric of the place.

"I've felt a new urgency to write about Cuba now, not Cuba then," he declares. "It's not my memories I find so interesting. It's stories about what Cubans have become."

That first trip to his homeland laid the groundwork for Machado's touted Off Broadway play, "Cuba is Waiting." It considers a writer much like Machado and a wily Cuban cabbie who helps him search for traces of his past.

On a 2001 visit, Machado found a gustatory gold mine at a paladar (a home-based Cuban restaurant) called Gladys's House. It was located in an art deco villa and run by a woman in her 70s.

In his memoir, Machado writes, "Gladys made food that reminded me of my childhood more than anything I had ever eaten. Gladys herself reminded me of my grandmother Manuela, beautiful, direct, and poised."

Recipes Gladys shared with him for such dishes as garlic chicken and vaca frita (fried steak) wound up in "Tastes Like Cuba," an autobiography Domitrovich urged Machado to write.

But Gladys also became the model for the fictionalized lead character in "The Cook."

Recalls Machado, "I was chatting with Gladys in her paladar when I saw pictures on the wall of this blond woman in 1960s clothes. I asked who it was and she said, 'That's the woman who owned this house.'

"I'd heard of cases where servants agreed to save the house of people they worked for, and I was intrigued by that. I wrote the entire play in Cuba in longhand, in four notebooks."

In "The Cook" (which premiered in 2005, at Hartford Stage in Connecticut), Gladys is an Afro-Cuban who believes in the Revolution but also loyally vows to guard her fleeing employer's Havana home — and does so, for decades.

Machado, who is "very involved" with the Seattle mounting of the play, says, "For me it is about Cuba, and what people did to survive and keep going."

Chicago Tribune drama critic Chris Jones called the work "a rich, heartfelt and gutsy piece of writing."

And to Machado's delight, "People fall in love with Gladys — which means they fall in love with a ... communist!"

But the writer has angered exiles of his parents' generation — not only with his plays, but also his outspoken support of cultural exchanges between the U.S. and Cuba, and of ending the U.S. embargo of the country.

"I think the older people still want revenge," he states. "But I believe you have to separate politics, from trying to help the people who are living there."

And what does Machado do in the U.S., when he craves good Cuban food? "I go to a place in New York called Floradita, on 125th Street and Broadway. I order beef stew, fried bananas, rice and beans, and it's just like home."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com