Hi all,
I'm going to Havana next week for ten days (yay!). We'll spend two days at a local beach but mostly in Havana: the night life, the music, the dancing, the culture. It's going to be super fun, and a vacation that's not about the food but the experiences. We'll be staying in a couple of "casa particulares" so with locals and not hotels that run restaurants with lots of choices.

I'm wondering - can anyone share their experiences with low (or lowish) carb eating outside of resorts and hotels in Cuba?

(I'm willing to be flexible, and I also plan to bring in some packages of jerky and macadamia nuts for emergency foods if they will let me. However, I have some IBS triggered mostly by beans and legumes ... Ordinarily I eat local as part of the experience / understand the culture and not be a demanding foreigner who doesn't understand the financial constraints of the country... But I can't be rushing in a panic the find a local loo repeatedly throughout the day!)

Any experiences, thoughts, advice to help me plan?

I'll reply to myself, now that I am back, in case anyone else has this question and comes looking.

The short answer is that unless you only want to eat street food, (super cheap sandwiches or cardboard pizza at a window in the wall, which is fun but not necessary) it is easy to be low carb in Havana. All restaurants, the paladores included, serve simple meat dishes. Prices range from about 6 CUC to 15 for the main dish, and portions are large. If the sides are automatically included it tends to be rice, beans and salad. Often there are no sides included so you just order the ones you want with your meat. Vegetables are basic -- a salad or sauteed veg. It was easy to order pork or fish or chicken and a salad. Even the museum restaurants that offered sandwiches also offered brochettes (or "stilletos") -- grilled meat on a stick with a leaf or two of lettuce. Very easy.

Breakfasts in the casa particulares (we stayed at three different ones) were a huge plate of fruit, a fresh fruit juice, and then eggs however you wanted them -- scrambled with vegetables was the best. After the first day, I either asked for no fruit or I ate a slice of two and gave the rest to my partner. Don;t like guava juice so that was easy.

The real trick is the amount of drinking -- cocktails and beer everywhere, rum everywhere in sugared drinks, tourists drinking from 11 am on. The local mint is much milder than the mint in Canada so I found the mojitos a bit bland anyway -- Cubans have a fairly high sugar diet but bartenders had no problem making mojitos without sugar -- were very good and refreshing and made them a bit less bland. Beer is everywhere, wine more difficult and expensive, brought in from south America mostly and not worth it we felt. Ice cream not worth it. Fresh made juice was everywhere, and mostly without sugar (ask for jugo naturales) and often cut with water to be light and refreshing.

The best trick was to have brought a few bags of macadamia nuts. I ate a handful before lunch and dinner or in the middle of the day -- which kept me full enough to order on plan, or only eat a bit of a treat (ie: couple of tablespoons of rice and beans with the meat) and not feel so hungry or deprived that i face-planted into the whole bowl or fried plantains...Never bought the fried doughnut things, and only had one churro.

If anyone is interested, the things i ate off plan on in my journal We walked about 15,000 steps a day and I ate a very moderate carb diet and returned home at 2.5 lbs up...which disappeared the 3rd day home and i think was related to water retention from flying.

So to anyone heading that way, it can totally be done even though not a resort!

Hope you had an amazing trip! Thanks for posting. My and I DH really want to see Cuba someday.

The food sounds great, btw

Thanks! It was fun. I'm not sure the food was "great" - but it was definitely possible to low carb, and the people were super friendly.
Very interesting community and culture, and more affordable than other Caribbean countries.