Jorge and Paola Ramos

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1:00Ruthie's Table 4, presented by Sky. Cold open. You want to be silent? Don't be a journalist. I think part of our responsibility is to question and challenge those who are in power. And if we don't do that, then we're not doing our job as journalists. And our job mainly is, of course, reporting the reality as it is, but to question those who are in power. Introduction. Growing up, as I did in the 60s, the United States was a tumultuous time. The assassinations of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War, Kent State, Watergate, Selma, and much, much more. In a frightening world, journalists were heroes, seeking the truth with integrity and courage.

1:45And so today, when we need them more than ever, it was thrilling to be introduced to two extraordinary journalists, father and daughter Jorge Ramon and Paola Ramon. Listening to their podcast, The Moment, is a revelation. They question, they analyze, and they report. Jorge and Paola and I live in different countries and have different professions. But I feel there are strong connections. There's Mexico, food, friendship, and truth. I also have the feeling this is just the beginning of a strong friendship. Oh, thank you so much. Beautiful introduction. Thanks for inviting us. We are. I'm thrilled.

2:25Now, we have one way of doing this, which is that everybody who's on the podcast asks, would you read a recipe? And I was trying to think of a recipe to choose for you because I am passionate about the food of your country. And such a conversation is about how different it is from the perception is the reality, I think. But we chose a recipe with beans, bollotti beans, which are Italian, and langoustine, which are you know the crayfish they call them in there I don't know what I would like this team the small lobster Camarón? Yeah, Camarón. It's so interesting that you're saying that because my mom always cook for for Christmas and for the end of the year sopa de camarón, caldo de camarón So it's a shrimp soup very very spicy and I remember the mornings of December 24th and December 31st that she would wake up very early in the morning.

3:22She would have a stack of hundreds of little, very little shrimp, Camaroon, and then she would peel each one of them by hand. So by the time we went to eat it, it was my mom's spirit going through that. So I've been following for the rest of my life that special flavor of caldo de camarón, the shrimp soup and I'm telling you I haven't been able to find it. My mom fortunately she's alive but she's not cooking anymore. We should go to Mexico and get that recipe. But my sister, somehow she got the recipe and whenever I go to Spain where she lives I have caldo de Camarón which brings me back to my chaffle.

4:08Can you describe it? What's it like? It's very spicy,

4:16lemony, ajo, with garlic. You have to get the little shrimp from the market. Dry shrimp. Oh they're dry? It's dried shrimp. So they get it, you have to get it in the morning or the day before and then you peel hundreds and hundreds of little tiny shrimp. Once they do that, they fried it and after that on the side they will create a broth, again spicy and lemony with oil and so many different species that I cannot even remember and then they put it together at night. So it takes I would say eight to nine hours just to have it ready. So when you have it, it's really a treasure for you. And do you mostly do have it at Christmas?

5:09Is that something that you can have? We used to have it at Christmas, at Christmas and New Year's. And I was waiting the whole year just for that. Because for some reason, I don't know why, my mom wouldn't do it throughout the year. She would wait for that moment. And I'm still waiting for that. I've never seen you, I've never seen him be so passionate when you talk about. No, truly, but I think that speaks to the memories that come up. Because I'm an immigrant, I came to the United States, and as an immigrant, you lose so many different things. So food is a way of bringing me back to my country.

5:45I never wanted to be an immigrant. I became an immigrant because I had to. I wanted to be a rocker and a soccer player, but never an immigrant. And then when you're an immigrant, food brings you back to your origins, to the country where you came from. And caldo de camarón, the shrimp soup, tacos al pastor. What is that? Well, the tacos that you have on the street in Mexico City where you were, you can walk any neighborhood. And then you would have the tacos on the street and you eat the tacos standing up. You have to open your legs so the sauce and the lemon and the sauces from the pork wouldn't fall down.

6:35And so I'm always looking for the best taco al pastor all over the world. All over the world. And have you found one? No. No? No, the one that I remember is when I was young in Mexico. So I'm looking for that flavor that I had when I was 20, when I was 21, before I came to the United States. And it's... I'm not sure if I'm ever going to find the same flavor that I left. But it's a good question. As an immigrant, you're always looking for that food that brings you back, like Marcel Proust. Is the time lost? somehow you think you can get it back yes by by eating the same thing and then every once in a while when I go to a restaurant and I find that that that bite that brings me back to Mexico there's something spiritual something something happens I'm not religious but in that moment do you feel I'm I'm as young as 10 years old I'm as old as I am right now yeah that is food and do you feel as the next generation what is your what are your memory you know your feelings about that?

7:40I mean, I think when you look at the picture of what our family is, I have a Mexican dad. My mom is Cuban. I grew up in Madrid, but I was born in Miami. Wow. That's a lot of... Exactly. But I think it speaks to, in a way, the way in which our family has been fragmented, but also I think comes together and we're able to kind of hold on to these identities through these memories that my dad is talking about, right? And food for me in a way has been honestly the closest thing that I've had, for instance, to feeling Cuban, right? Like my, at least on my mom's side, they have spent their entire lives living as exiles.

8:21I grew up with my mom's side in Madrid. So with my Cuban grandmother and my Cuban grandfather and my Mexican grandmother, my dad's mom, she was in Mexico. So I have this proximity, this closeness with my Cuban side. And what comes up are two things. Number one, the cafe cubano, um,

8:44Cuban coffee, but it's, it's, it is so sweet. It probably gave my grandfather two heart attacks, two heart attacks that he did have because it is a shot of espresso with condensed milk. And every day my grandfather would have two cortaditos every day. And he passed away two years ago, But our routine, particularly the last couple of months of his life, was every afternoon we would have our cortadito together. At what age? I mean, so when you were young even? Since I was young until he passed away when he was 80 years old. Was there sugar in it as well? He put sugar. I did not. One day, I'll tell you a little story.

9:25One day, my husband was the architect with Red So Piano of the Pompidou Center in Paris. and we used to walk to work after lunch because being Italian you had lunch every day at home that's when I started really cooking and so we'd walk back and we'd go to a cafe and have an espresso and then we'd take the espresso and one day by mistake I took Renzo's espresso and it had sugar in it and it was so delicious and you love it coffee can taste like this because the Italians always probably like perhaps the Cubans put sugar in their coffee everywhere but but specifically that condensed milk of el cortadito is i mean i think it's such a i mean it's so he was cuban my grandfather was a was cuban he was a cuban exile so my my mom's side fled from cuba in the early 60s so right as fidel castro's taking over my grandfather was a political prisoner so he was in jail for for over a year castro batista under castro under castro And then my mom and my grandmother luckily were able to get out.

10:28My grandfather eventually got out. And obviously, you know, my dad ends up in Miami as a Mexican journalist for work. But I think Miami in that sense brings together, I think, people that are constantly yearning, knowing longing and nostalgia. I saw that you interviewed Castro. Fidel Castro and Nicolás Maduro. How is Castro? Tall. And then he asked me if I was living in Miami. I said yes. And then back then there were no cell phones. And I thought, 1990 probably. And then I thought if somebody takes a picture of me because he put his arm around my shoulder, I saw his nails, huge nails, dirty nails.

11:21and the brain is incredible because while I was thinking of all this I was thinking if somebody takes a picture of Fidel Castro embracing me I cannot go back to Miami. So I started asking him questions about the lack of democracy. Back then there was the idea of a plebiscite in Cuba. As you know the Soviet Union had disappeared so everybody thought Cuba was next and then one of his bodyguards he didn't hit me but he pushed me by my stomach and I ended up on the floor and then Fidel Castro kept on walking and never looked back. Never looked back? Never looked back 59 seconds. You've never been back since.

12:04And I was no I cannot go back to. Can you? I've been and which almost gave him a heart attack. Of course because yeah I went one time when when Obama opened it the first time that that he opened it and I that was a purely personal trip right that was a way for me to to see where my family I did I visited where my mom was born I I met some of the very same neighbors that were still there when she was born in 1961 and that was very emotional and then I went again during COVID as a journalist and so that I went through Spain and then also questioning my ability to to go with his last name and with my grandpa's last name Ramos and Montaner a political prisoner and a journalist that had been kicked out by Fidel.

12:50And so I went through Spain with my Spanish passport and I did a small documentary with a producer just with our phones. It was basically just getting an inside look into the protesters that had taken the streets of Havana and many of them had ended up incarcerated. And so we embedded with some of the artists that were still protesting and were activists. We got a very good sense of the repression that was obviously still in place. And more than anything, we really witnessed the way that the pandemic had just really pushed the country into unprecedented crisis. I think the very same crisis that we're seeing right now in Cuba.

13:31People say that Venezuela could also be Rubio's war against Cuba. Absolutely. I think part of the problem is that there seems to be no plan B. So you take the dictator and then what do you do? But I think that is I think Rubio comes from a family of Cuban immigrants. His rise, his political rise is due and thanks to the Cuban-American elite in Florida. And so I think maybe for someone like Trump, there's no incentive in all of this, right? Maybe for him, it's just about power and money. But I think for someone like Rubio, to your point, I think there's like a real ideological mission there. There's something new right now.

14:13I think it's a new doctrine completely. No, people say it's not the Monroe Doctrine. Don't, that's how Trump likes to call it. But I think it's really the Trump Doctrine, which is basically America for Trump. It's power, power, power, power. And then the world divided between Putin in Eastern Europe and then China on Asia and the United States controlling the Western Hemisphere. But when you were talking about Venezuela, You did tell Maduro that his food was garbage and that people were eating. You did bring up food. You brought up the food. Didn't you tell that story? Yeah, what happened is that Nicolas Maduro invited me for an interview.

14:57He thought he was going to... Nobody gives you an interview. They think they're going to lose. So he thought he was going to win. And I started the interview telling him right up front that he was a dictator. Obviously, he didn't like that. But he kept on talking to me. We talk about political prisoners. But then the days before the interview with Nicolás Maduro, I remember driving with my team and then noticing that people were very hungry and that they were eating from trash cans. Close to the Palacio de Miraflores, the presidential palace, I saw a trash truck, un camión de basura, and there were kids eating from the truck.

15:41Had you ever seen that anywhere else? Yes, everywhere. Okay. So you've seen it in democracies? Yeah, I've seen it everywhere. You see it even in the United States, in Europe. I've seen it everywhere. But when you're in a revolution and you say, as they were saying, that people were not hungry and that people were doing better and that you couldn't see that, I just wanted to tell him that it was also happening in Venezuela. So I showed him the image of the kids eating from the trash cans, and he stood for everything except for that image. So he stood up, he put his hand in front of the laptop trying to prevent the cameras from seeing that, and he stopped the interview.

16:28Not only that, they stopped the interview, they stole our cameras, they stole the video cards, They arrested us, and then they deported us the day after. And they arrested you. Did they have to have grounds for arresting you, or did they just say? The grounds were that we were asking. You were insulted. Or that we were showing the president, the dictator, images that he didn't want to see. So he wanted to prove that he was a democratic leader. I think at the end we proved that he was not. But everything at the end had to do with that image of kids eating from trash. Somebody said that to me last night.

17:04I had dinner in San Francisco, the friend of mine, and I was condemning, I think we all feel, that there are two separate issues here. One is walking into a country and say you're going to run the country, and the other one is what you're talking about, the person there. And it happens everywhere. And she said to me, Ruthie, they were eating garbage. And yes, they were eating garbage, and it's a terrible situation. And they're continuing to eat garbage. And they are, and we have, you know, food poverty is a huge issue. I think even now in the U.S., right? I mean, I think the number one issue on voters' mind, Democrats or Republicans, is the issue of affordability, right?

17:43It's the idea that even the most, you know, the richest country in the world, you know, has families that literally can't make it. And so I've, you know, I think even even in New York, it's been interesting because I live in New York and I've spent obviously a lot of time with different type of voters and even hearing some Trump voters like deep in Brooklyn, like Dikers Heights, suddenly find something appealing and someone as, you know, progressive as Zohar Mandani. And it comes down to that, to this idea of affordability, of not having literally enough food on their plates. And so I think it's the top issue for everybody right now.

18:25So this is the recipe. So it's langoustine with borlotti beans, which you know are the red beans. So it's with fresh beans. Okay, so langoustines with borlotti beans. Serves to 300 grams potted fresh borlotti beans. Two garlic cloves peeled. Six fresh saged leaves. 50 milligrams of olive oil. 100 milligrams of extra virgin olive oil plus extra for drizzling. Okay, juice of one lemon. 12 langoustines cooked and peeled. One fresh red chili seeded and finely chopped. A small bunch of fresh marjoram leaf chopped. All right, okay. So put the bologna beans in a large pan and cover it with water. Add the garlic cloves, sage leaves, and olive oil.

19:16Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for about 40 minutes or until the beans are softened and edible. Drain off any extra liquid from the pan. Add the extra virgin oil, lemon juice, and peel langoustines to the warm beans and toss gently over a low heat until the langoustines are just warmed through. transfer to serving plates, add the chili and marjoram, and drizzle with extra virgin olive oil. Okay, thank you. I don't even know how much we mispronounced.

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20:44And I say to my mom and my grandparents through food, through these memories that take you back. And even within the family, something interesting is that she learned to drink coffee. But in Mexico, for some reason, my mom, when we were growing up, she used to say that only adults could drink coffee. So I grew up drinking hot chocolate, which I do until this time. And then I started just drinking coffee maybe a couple of months ago because they say it's good for my stomach. I mean, I had to train my dad. Every single night, my dad drinks hot chocolate. That's quite modern, I think. Yeah, Nesquik.

21:31Well, it's just the same the same flavor. What about the chocolate you know of Mexico, the mojaca? Well, I'm not sure if you want to get into this, but my mom and my dad, they had a great relationship. But up to a point after 40 years and five kids, there was something missing. No. So my father was very, very strict, but every night he expected hot chocolate, Mexican hot chocolate made by my mom. And it had to be in a special way with foam at the top. But if it was not at the right temperature and with foam at the top, my dad, horribly, would push aside the hot chocolate and said, it's not right.

22:18and he wouldn't drink it. So my mom, with a lot of discipline, she did it for almost 40 years. And one night she said, Jorge, that was his name, I'm not going to make that hot chocolate for you ever again. And then they split. That marriage was over. They split. My dad left. Did he find someone else who could make that hot chocolate? He went to my grandma's house where she would do the chocolate for him. Anyway, eventually my dad came back and my mom kept on doing the hot chocolate until he died. Your dad came back? His dad came back. And then she took it. She kept on doing the hot chocolate. The misconception, I think, about Mexican food in the United States, which is that it was heavy, there's a lot of food on the plate, You have mixtures of tortillas and this and that and beans and rice and everything.

23:16And then I went to Mexico and it's very light food. It was clean. It was pure. It was a beautiful piece of fish that had been cooked with, you know, chilies or, you know, something very delicate and very thought out. It's very sophisticated now. And even at the street food as well, when you're describing, you know, the tacos or the burritos or what you're having, there still is a clarity of taste, I think. And right now, I'm sure you realize that just a few months ago, there's a taqueria, a place for tacos, that got a Michelin star for the first time. Yeah, where was that? In Mexico City. In Mexico City.

23:53In Mexico City and then it used to be just a regular place for tacos and now has become, there are lines and lines and people wait for hours just to get it. But you're absolutely right, Mexico City has become a place that you go just to go to different restaurants and the food is incredibly sophisticated. There's a wonderful restaurant called Puyol. I love Puyol. It's amazing. By Chef Enrique Olvera. And then you go to Puyol and then you realize that it is, that Mexican food has traveled very well. I loved, I don't know if you used to do that, but the hours that Mexican people, Mexico City ate.

24:33So you have breakfast. That's what we did. My friends and I would go out to breakfast to a place called Nido. And we would go out at about 10 or 11, have breakfast. I'd go to the hospital, then we'd have breakfast. And then you'd have kind of late, late, late lunch at about 4. I'd sit there until about 6, 6.30, and then no dinner. And I loved that. They'd have an apple or something, a piece of fruit for dinner. That's what they call soda. There's a name for that. It's called Soda Mesa, no? Which is essentially, yeah, you eat your meal, but then the aftermath, which is the beautiful part, right, where you just talk and you converse.

25:11And I think that I always notice when I'm in Mexico, if you look around, no one's on their phones, right? Like, truly. And then every time I land back in the U.S. and you're having a meal, like, we're all just connected. But that, to me, is also my favorite part. Do you go back to Mexico now? We do that as often as I can, trying to... When you're an immigrant, you're always looking for home. And for me, home was where I grew up as a kid. What year did you leave Mexico? I was 25. It's interesting that you define so much of your being as an immigrant. Because you said, I could have been a soccer player, but I became an immigrant.

25:53Well, there are soccer players who were immigrants and immigrants who become soccer players. But you saw that as a... No, yeah, because as an immigrant, the beauty of it is that I have two passports, the green one, the Mexican one, and the blue one. And I choose to be either Mexican or American whenever I go to Mexico City and see the lines at the airport. So the shorter line, I become Mexican or American. So in the best of times, I can be from both countries. But nowadays, it is very difficult. And sometimes when I'm in Mexico, I'm told, you betray the country. You left the country, so you're not Mexican.

26:32And here in the United States... By who? Who would say that to you? Well, even some friends, even members of the family who might think that I did the wrong thing by leaving the country. And then now that I'm in the United States, especially in the last 10 years, many people think that I don't belong to this country. And they tell you openly, no, just go back to your country, go back to your country. So that's why to be an immigrant is my identity. And then that's something that you really cannot change. Maybe it's the times. Maybe if it was another time, it would be different. That you would feel welcome everywhere.

27:12Not anymore. Do you feel that identity? No. I mean, sure, I've gone through moments of identity crisis for sure. But I think that's one of the distinguishing factors between these generations. I think the second, third generation, I think we have understood. like my brother and I have understood that we can hold many different things at once and that and that that in and of itself is American no that is that is an American identity I think I look at my parents generation I look at other generations of other Latinos that are way less privileged than we are right um that have to kind of like tiptoe around things or have to assimilate or have to change their accent or have to conform to whatever they think means and looks American and I think we you know the quote like younger generation I think we've understood that you you can and should be proud and I and and I do sense that difference between us right like I think I look at my parents I look at my grandparents and I think there was a little bit of that game you know trying to conform and at the same time I think the the yearning is real you know that this idea of of even even thinking about like where does one where does where does one spend the last years of one's life.

28:28For my grandfather, the dream was always to go back to Cuba. I think for you, Dad, for many years, you at least played with the idea of going back to Mexico one day. Even today? Exactly. For my mom, I think she chose Spain because Cuba was too far. And so, for me, New York City is home. Yeah. But I am, you know, I'm always I've fabricated this idea of what I think, of where I think I come from. And I think to my dad's point of going to Mexico and not feeling Mexican enough, being here and not feeling American enough, I sometimes feel that, you know? I've been an immigrant since I was 19 because I went to England for six months and ended up living there for 50 years.

29:14And I think if you talk to a lot of my grandchildren, Sads, daughters, or my sons, very often their identity will not be their country. It will be their city. they will say i'm a londoner rather than i'm british although it even gets more extreme you know they'll say i'm from brooklyn i'm not from you know they'll say i feel that as a brooklyn that's true okay yeah and you know people and and i i think that identity is is so complicated now as to where we you know what we identify with as an american i know that right now when everybody says to me you're so lucky and i feel you know to be out of america right now there's part of me that's never wanted to be there more.