From our Bureau of Socialist Social Justice with some assistance from our Bureau of Socialist Fish Tales and our Bureau of Exportable Apartheid
Castro, Inc. has been caught lying innumerable times, day after day, but one of its latest lies is a whopper.
After a vice-minister of Castro, Inc.’s food industry told Cubans last week that the seas around Cuba have run out of fish, Diario de Cuba did some research and discovered –very quickly and without much digging — that Cuba exports tons and tons of seafood, including high-priced items such as lobster.
Meanwhile, Cubans hardly ever get to eat any seafood. This criminal behavior is made possible by the fact that Castro, Inc. controls everything and its prime directive is to stay in power at any cost. So, it denies food to Cubans in order to earn income from foreign nations.
How utopian is this? Enjoy your Cuban lobster tails, Canadians! Castro, Inc. loves you so much, it extends its apartheid policies to your own soil.
Loosely translated from Diario de Cuba
A statement made by the Vice Minister of the Food Industry, Mydalis Naranjo Blanco has become very controversial. The Vice Minister said on the radio and television program Mesa Redonda that the seas that surround Cuba do not have enough fish to satisfy the consumption needs of Cubans.
Are there really no fish in Cuban territorial waters? Does the crisis of the insular fishing fleet, modern and functional decades ago, prevent them from fishing in deep waters? Will Cubans have to settle for freshwater farming and catching to satisfy their demand for fish?
DIARIO DE CUBA found —through the Trading Economics site and the United Nations Comtrade database, representative of more than 99% of world merchandise trade— that, contrary to what official officials say, there is fish production in Cuba. But not for the inhabitants of the Island.
According to official Canadian figures, that country imported only in 2022 products from the Cuban seas for a value of 9.44 million dollars, below the 11 million in 2021 and almost 12 million in 2019.
Cuba’s sales to the North American country include, according to the figures, fish, crustaceans, shellfish and aquatic invertebrates. But more than six million dollars in 2022 corresponded to live fish.
Let’s look at the import reports from China, one of the main buyers of species from the Cuban sea. In 2022, the Asian nation bought 28.24 million dollars in marine animals from Cuba.
China imported more than 30 million dollars worth of fish, shellfish and crustaceans from Cuba in 2017, 2018 and 2019, respectively, with a drop in 2020 and zero purchases in 2021. So its acquisitions are on the way to recovering.
In the case of Spain, the trend is the opposite: in 2022 it bought 28.75 million dollars in Cuban seafood, a record figure and higher than the 26.5 million in 2016.
These are not the only destination markets for fishing in Cuba. But between the three they totaled 66.43 million dollars last year. Is there fish or not in the seas of Cuba?
What that apparatchik meant was that, since seafood is only for Cuba’s ruling class and the foreign market, there might as well be no fish in the sea as far as ordinary Cubans go. She was just being tactful, you see.