In time, I came to understand that talking about food — the yearning for certain kinds of food — was safer than talking about other needs. Food was a metaphor for our more pressing, but forbidden, needs.

I know a couple who told me they left the island the day Fidel Castro announced that milk production was low and, therefore, there would be a shortage of butter that year. My friend looked at her husband and said: “Fernando, we have to go. I can’t live without butter.”

My friends were artists. By the time milk became a problem, artists had been ostracized, priests and nuns had been exiled, religious schools had been closed, and many who opposed or simply didn’t obey the dictates of the revolution had been jailed, executed or sent to reform camps. It’s possible that the looming lack of butter was the trigger that prompted their departure, but I know their angst and needs ran deeper.

About 18 years ago I interviewed my parents for a book I wrote about the boatlift. They were 20 when Fidel Castro came to power and 40 when they left Cuba. I asked them how they could put up with the scarcities and the repression for so long. How could they bear wasting their best years standing in endless lines for meager rations and quashing their true selves?

My mother told me that they had learned to live with it. “It didn’t happen all at once, you see,” she said. “One day you go shopping and you find there is no soap, but you hope it’ll come another day and you go on. The following week, there is no chicken, so you don’t make a soup, you make something else, and you hope things will get better. And life goes on and the years pass. Then, suddenly, 10, 15 years later, one day you realize there is no food in the pantry, no shampoo, all your friends have left and you’ve lost your freedom. By then it’s too late.”

I think about that now, as I contemplate the empty shelves in the supermarket aisles. Everyone is quiet, wearing masks, as we all should, and keeping our distance, as we’ve been told to do. The herd behavior both soothes and unnerves me.