Rosa Porto, the baker and Cuban émigré who founded the popular Porto’s Bakery & Café chain in Southern California with her family, died Friday, according to the business’s Instagram page. She was 89.
“I learned by breaking eggs and from necessity,” Rosa Porto was quoted in the Times as saying. “I started baking the cakes for my kids, and since they were pretty, my neighbors started asking me to make cakes for them.”
Porto came from Manzanillo, Cuba. After Fidel Castro took power on the island in 1959, Porto lost her job as a manager at a cigar distributor, and her husband, Raul, was sent to a labor camp. Porto, who had grown up learning the recipes of her Spanish-born mother, supported her family by making and selling brandy-soaked sponge cakes, though Castro’s regime forbade private citizens from owning businesses.
After years on a wait list, Porto and her family were allowed to leave Cuba in the early 1970s. They arrived flat broke in Los Angeles, where Raul got a job as a janitor and Rosa baked and sold cakes from home for neighbors and fellow Cuban immigrants.
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