Valienska Magfira, Pavel Acosta, ENEMA Art Collective

Cuban Blood Sausages

Blood Sausage Performance by ENEMA Art Collective

Although we live in a world filled with different cultures, cuisines, and languages, there is one dish that is shared among cultures and one that has lasted through different traditions. That dish is the blood sausage.


ENEMA's collective blood sausage - Blood Sausage prepared with the blood from the members of ENEMA with the traditional Cuban recipe in 2003.  This photo was taken by Pavel Acosta ENEMA Art Collective, Pavel Acosta

The ingredients of a blood sausage varies between different cultures. Meat, cornbread, oats, lentils, cereal or rice have been used as common filler ingredients. The blood however, can also vary from different animals such as pigs (being the most well-known for blood sausages), ducks, cows, or goats. What is uncommonly common in the art world rather, is the use of human blood for blood sausages.

Most recent human blood sausage was cooked by Dutch journalist, Gwen van der Zwan, last May, which was prepared with surinamese herbs and all vegetarian fillers. But on the other side of the world, the ENEMA art collective in Havana, Cuba have produced their own variation of the blood sausage back in 2003. Are human blood sausages not as daring as we thought it would be in the art world? Or like the dish itself, perhaps a human blood sausage is a representation of a culture based on how its prepared despite not being original.

The ENEMA art collective prepared their sausages in the traditional cuban way, but with the collection of blood from multiple ENEMA members. This project was then presented in the 2003 VIII Havana Biennale with the Biennale’s curated exposition called Art and Life.