While the Castro dictatorship continues to build luxury apartheid resorts and hotels for foreign tourists, Cubans continue to go without bread. The Cuban regime, which prioritizes foreign currency revenue into its coffers, has announced that ongoing flour shortages are forecasted to continue until the end of March, leaving state-owned ration stores without bread. The Castro regime blames U.S. sanctions for the bread shortage, but the sanctions do not appear to affect Cuba’s apartheid hotels and resorts where foreign tourists feast on endless, all-you-can-eat buffets of gourmet food. This is socialism in action.
Via CiberCuba (my translation):
Cuban government announces severe restrictions in the distribution of rationed bread
Authorities from the Ministry of Food Industry (MINAL) announced that until the end of March, there will be severe disruptions in the delivery of rationed bread due to delays in the arrival of wheat shipments.
“Financial restrictions associated mainly with the intensified blockade and the logistical limitations suffered by Cuba to bring wheat from distant markets are the essential causes of the delay in the arrival of ships with the wheat,” explained a report from the National Television News (NTV).
“At this moment, we have only one wheat mill operating out of the five we have today, which is the mill in Cienfuegos, which only manages to produce 250 tons of flour daily out of the 700 needed for the consumption of only the bread provided in the standard ration book,” detailed Emerio González Lorenzo, president of the Business Group of the Food Industry, who specified that the last shipments arrived at the end of January.
To mitigate the current shortage of wheat flour, the use of up to 15 percent of “extenders” in the production of bread from the standard ration book has been directed.
On the other hand, they announced that the purchase of imported flour is being negotiated by “non-state management forms.”
González Lorenzo affirmed there is a priority on the part of the entities involved in the port-transport-internal economy chain to ensure that wheat or flour reaches the mills immediately, despite the complex reality of fuel shortages that Cuba also faces.
The Cuban Bread Company will maintain limited offers according to the conditions in each territory.
Cuba has five mills to process wheat: three in Havana, one in Cienfuegos, and another in Santiago de Cuba. Monthly, 20,000 tons of flour are needed just to produce the bread that guaranteed in the standard ration book.
The drama of wheat flour shortages to cope with bread production is not new. In 2023, Cubans already experienced periodic irregularities in the distribution of standard bread throughout the country.
In Ciego de Ávila, families began receiving in September a standard bread ration of only 50 grams, instead of the usual 80, due to the shortage of flour experienced in Cuba.
The poor quality of the bread distributed is added to these irregularities. In recent days, a Cuban woman reported that her nephew, a child, found a marabou thorn in the bread he received as part of the standard quota.
Damn straight the regime prioritizes capturing foreign revenue, aka real money (unlike Cuban money). Some have suggested that since fixing Cuba’s economy is incompatible with maintaining totalitarian power, the regime plans to milk the situation for all it can to enrich itself as much as possible until things collapse, at which point it will bail out like Batista did and live off its riches abroad.