From our Bureau of Alimentary Apartheid with some assistance from our Bureau of Photos That Gnaw At Your Soul
One photo from the recent Havana food fair says it all. Castro, Inc. prefers to please foreigners rather than Cubans. The artisan bread on display at the fair is something Cubans never even get to see, much less consume. And the bread Cubans actually get to eat is not only scarce, but horrifically bad.
Naturally, Castro, Inc. has a million excuses for its inability to provide bread for Cubans. It’s the embargo. It’s the bad wheat sent by Russia. It’s the lack of equipment, etc… Ah, but there is always plenty of good bread for tourists. And that food fair bread display proves it.
Loosely translated from Marti Noticias
“It feels like I’m chewing ground glass,” warned a Cuban woman on social media about the poor quality of bread being sold to the population in the bodegas of Las Tunas. However, the authorities insist that, despite this, the food is “fit for consumption.”
They explained that it was a shipment of wheat from Russia that recently arrived at the port of Santiago de Cuba. “It has a high level of impurities, which due to the technological characteristics of the Cuban industry, are difficult to completely remove, leaving a percentage in the raw material to be processed.”
“It’s a lack of respect to the people, giving us something that is unfit, without anyone caring about the fate of our children and elderly who could even get sick. It’s clear that the directors of the food industry do not eat this bread… This is inhumane and abusive,” a user clarified in the local newspaper’s post on the subject.
“Regardless of the laboratory results, that bread is for pigs and should not be offered to the population… We go to bed without electricity, wake up without electricity, have nothing for breakfast, and lack many essentials for life,” added another.
At the end of February, the regime admitted that they could not guarantee subsidized bread from the basic food basket due to a shortage of wheat flour.
“In the coming days, severe disruptions in bread production will be faced in each territory, due to instability in the supply of raw materials,” explained Zaily Pérez Hernández, commercial director of the state-owned Empresa de Molinería.
Cuba requires 20,000 tons of wheat per month just to produce bread for the regulated family basket, but most of this has to be imported. Despite agreements with allied countries, such as Russia, instability in bread production on the island remains a pending issue.
About $6,000,000 is needed to maintain Cuban mills, according to authorities, who acknowledged just a few weeks ago that in the past five years they have accessed only 23% of that amount.
Cuba is undergoing a deep food crisis amid rampant inflation and the partial dollarization of the economy.
In its report “Manufacturing Industry in Cuba. Selected Indicators 2023,” the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) acknowledged that in the past five years, food production has plummeted.
“It shows a decline of up to 67%… The 23 products selected by ONEI, including basic foods necessary for the family basket, have a sustained decrease, in some cases exceeding a 90% reduction in production,” said political scientist Sergio Ángel Baquero, coordinator of the Food Monitor Program, an organization investigating the socioeconomic impact of food policies in authoritarian contexts.
Look on the bright side: Castronoids could hardly be more honest, however unwittingly, about their priorities and disdain for “the people.” The willfully blind will remain so, but there’s no question what the truth is.