Introductory note on this Wall Street Journal story:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs952-intro.html

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Bi-lingual website of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Pinar del Rio, Cuba: http://www.vitral.org/
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PAGE ONE
A Cuban Guru's Tip:
Salad Dressing Makes
Nice Hair Conditioner

As homemaking gurus go, 72-year-old Margarita Gálvez is no Martha Stewart.

Mrs. Gálvez writes articles, churns out recipes and hosts coffee klatches for the Roman Catholic bishop's office in the western Cuban city of Pinar del Rio. But her skillet skills can't get too fancy in a socialist economy where monthly meat rations roughly equal two hamburger patties. Beauty tips must be simple enough for a country where even soap and hot water are scarce -- and where the average monthly wage is $17.

Because of such obstacles, Mrs. Gálvez may be the only homemaking authority whose salad-dressing recipe is useful to hairdressers as well as to cooks.

Mrs. Gálvez's vinegar topping can serve, in a pinch, as a hair conditioner. Her advice: save the water used to rinse dried rice rations and add two spoonfuls of dark sugar. After letting the mixture marinate for 45 days, you'll have a vinegary liquid that will perk up lettuce greens at the dinner table -- or add sheen to hair after shampooing.

"Everything has a purpose on earth, but many things have more than one purpose," says Mrs. Gálvez, encapsulating her philosophy.

Mrs. Gálvez, a soft-spoken grandmother of eight, is a master of la alternativa -- the alternative -- a phrase that has entered the Cuban lexicon to describe the substitutes people invent for things they haven't been able to buy since the Soviet Union's collapse sent Cuba's economy reeling. She knows how to make a soy-sauce alternative from sugar, and "flan" from fruit or vegetables to replace scarce corn starch and eggs.

What passes for a beauty treatment on this Marxist island can also be unusual. To keep hands soft, soak them in bread crumbs and warm milk, says Mrs. Gálvez.

For several years, her tips and tricks have appeared regularly in the Pinar del Rio diocese samizdat magazine Vitral, or Stained Glass Window. Resembling a slightly plumped-up church bulletin, Vitral is published by a civic arm of the Catholic diocese. It has a national circulation of roughly 10,000, as well as an Internet site. Its popularity owes to its straight talk on politics and economics -- a departure from the norm in the censored media.

Mrs. Gálvez's work, assisted by several other church ladies, is starkly apolitical. But it does highlight the culinary divide in Cuba, which has been battered by economic mismanagement and a 44-year-old U.S. trade embargo. Foreign tourists -- as well as a handful of Cubans -- can dine on lobster or shrimp. The great majority of people are stuck with fare like Mrs. Gálvez's "Syrian rice" -- plain rice mixed with onions and noodles.

Lately, foreigners have been riveted by the health problems of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Although Mr. Castro temporarily relinquished power, the hard slog of daily life for most Cubans has barely changed.

That's where Mrs. Gálvez, retired after 42 years as a schoolteacher and administrator, can help. She offers household survival strategies, both big and small, learned from raising three grown sons -- all doctors.

Mrs. Gálvez's "Household School" column hasn't appeared in recent editions, since she was tending to a dying sister. But Mrs. Gálvez still shows up early at the bishop's office, offering anyone who asks a recipe for fish-head stew or a tip for using boiled cherry stems as a headache remedy.

She advises homemakers to preserve tomatoes by sun-drying rather than canning them to save energy. To reduce the amount of cooking oil needed, she recommends boiling home fries for 10 minutes before putting them in the skillet. Wringing out soggy towels along the grain of the fabric and storing shoes in the open air, she notes, will help both last longer.

"She's got recipes you never thought of and answers to every homemaking problem you could imagine," says Blanca Cruz, a local homemaker.

Mrs. Gálvez started her columns and meetings with housewives in 2000, after years in which government rations of milk, bread, sugar and other staples had been reduced to critically low levels. "People were coming to the church offices wondering what they'd do for their next meal," says Hortensia Cires, who works with Mrs. Gálvez at the church.

These days, basic monthly rations cover only seven to ten days' needs, says economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. For the rest of their food and staples, most Cubans must scrounge at state-controlled or semiprivate agrarian markets, or on the black market.

At times, during Cuba's extended crisis, official state television has dabbled in homemaking-advice shows. But Communist Party tips, such as grinding up grapefruit rinds into alternative "steak" patties, were hard to digest, even by Cuban standards.

Mrs. Gálvez favors more common-sense strategies, such as saving the last spoonfuls of yogurt and mixing them with milk so the yogurt culture will reproduce. She is bullish on urban gardens, which have been flourishing in Cuba. One hint: Save coffee grounds for mulch. The grounds also drive away pesky Caribbean ants.

Right now, she's trying to adapt to a big change in cooking appliances imposed by Mr. Castro: his "miracle" Chinese rice cookers that also prepare meat and soup. As part of Cuba's growing alliance with China, the government has recently distributed millions of the versatile cookers to phase out gas and kerosene stoves. Mrs. Gálvez likes the appliance, but frets over her rising electricity bill.

For Cubans, conserving every kilowatt of energy is an obsession rivaling finding food. Mrs. Gálvez notes that it's possible to cook an egg or heat coffee on a crude but energy-efficient burner made by lighting some alcohol in a sawed-off metal can.

Cubans also have another, more personal, preoccupation: keeping their clothes, and themselves, clean. "Some people tell me they've felt dirty ever since the Berlin Wall fell," Mrs. Gálvez says. At times when laundry soap is scarce, Cubans improvise by using the pulpy fruit of the evergreen jaboncillo tree. Launderer beware, Mrs. Gálvez says. Some locals who mixed a homemade detergent from chemicals that had been spirited from sugar mills suffered skin rashes for their trouble.

Caution is as much a watchword for the Cuban homemaker as creativity. Mrs. Gálvez says neighbors recently had their faces swell up after eating unsanitary home-cured ham. Then there was the case of the person who had scrounged a box of what seemed to be table salt. It turned out to be sodium nitrite, a meat preservative that's toxic in sufficient quantities, and it killed a family member.