By Francisco Acevedo
HAVANA TIMES – The struggle to put food on the table every day is one of the toughest for the Cuban people. Although it’s never been easy, it’s really become a challenge for every family in recent decades.
After the Socialist Camp collapsed – where most of the products Cubans were consuming came from -, the situation became tremendously difficult. Apart from the few years the temporary “Cuban thaw” lasted with former US President Barack Obama’s visit to the island, and everything that came as a result, many people are finding the situation unsustainable and it’s the main reason for the great exodus the country has been experiencing since 2020.
However, our dear Miguel Diaz-Canel’s administration is still holding onto its discourse that the US blockade is to blame for everything, and that they are doing everything they can to control the situation.
This week, the Minister of Cuba’s Food Industry Manuel Santiago Sobrino set very high standards, in his appearance on the indescribable Mesa Redonda TV show.
Some of the things Sobrino said (which were way too many for an hour-and-a-half show) were that fishing hasn’t been doing very well in 2023 (it seems things were doing OK in previous years), only catching 58% of targets, approximately 23% less than catches reported in 2022, and there are over 60 boats sitting still because there aren’t any engines, which would cost 25,000-40,000 USD. “Suppliers don’t want to sell unless it’s for cash in hand,” he said. What did they expect, if every credit has been exhausted, lots of debts have been called off and nobody wants to do business with them?
As always, he touched upon the stale subject of powdered milk for children, which is a priority (he dared to say that they haven’t been supplying hotels so they can boost the food rations, which by the way, has less and less every day, and only has bread, rice and brown sugar in shrinking amounts. When other products occasionally appear, they don’t make up for the months they’ve been missing). Not surprisingly the official didn’t talk about expenses on luxury car imports, or the modern cars for the armed forces.
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Just one of these Teslas that you can see around Havana would be enough to fix the motors of half a fishing fleet. Who’s importing them? It should be doctors, engineers, architects, but it’s not, they’re Cuban-Americans that own businesses, who are taking their own cars over to Cuba a lot of the time, paying excessive customs duties to the Government.
But there isn’t even this powdered milk the government talks so much about. In other words, it’s not just milk or fish, it’s zero milk or fish.
According to Sobrino, the Government is covering costs to keep a liter of milk at 0.25 Cuban Peso (which is only guaranteed for children 7 and under), but that’s not the case. Milk producers especially are covering the cost, as well as everyday citizens, because their wages aren’t the same as their counterparts elsewhere in the world. If it costs what he says, a worker has enough with two hours of work, on the minimum wage of almost any country, to buy milk for the entire month. In fact, the Cuban Communist Party wouldn’t have to distribute milk, which no party in the world does, if everyone were paid what they should be, and milk producers managed their product from feeding and rearing cattle to selling the final product to the population.
Going back to Sobrino, he kept saying that beef and pork producing companies are basically not working because they didn’t receive the tons of meat expected, and the same goes for targets of milk for the industry, which are all less than they were last year.
“Given this reality in the international context (which context, if every country has everything available, for different prices?) we have to seek alternatives,” he said. Please, lots of countries have thousands of problems, but when it comes to food, 80% of them don’t have shortages.
He gave the example his ministry’s approval of a that makes commercial fishing more flexible, thanks to which 4,302 private boats were granted licenses, up from the 2970 that existed in 2022. But anyway, he’s admitting that it’s the State that is standing in the way, because these boats weren’t made this year, they were always there, and they weren’t authorized to fish because of the many bits of bureaucratic red tape his own Ministry had established. Multiply that by five fishermen/women per boat on average, to see how many jobs were created, just by changing a Law.
Sobrino asked: “What situation would we be in if the Cuban Government hadn’t done everything it has in recent years?” He had the audacity to ask that in front of the host of the show’s complicit gaze. At least he didn’t say since 1959, when this country was the leader in many fields in the continent. Is he only referring to what happened after July 11th? The beatings and surge in repression? Well, maybe Cuba would be free already if it hadn’t been for that. After a similar uprising in Poland that left Communism in the past for good, today there is fish and milk everywhere: the only real and effective measure would be for them to quit, then we’d see if boats finally have motors.
No, but careful, the Cuban Parliament passed the Food Sovereignty Act last year, where it clearly stipulates that it has to guarantee its people’s food demands. So, they are breaking the Law, which isn’t really sovereign anyway because most food comes from abroad. Anyone can write something down on a piece of paper, but nobody can go to the agro-market with it to buy the food they need to put on their plates. But anyways, we’re going to “continue moving forward”, “this is the path”, as Sobrino explained, “in a not-so-distant future” (it seems 64 years haven’t been enough).
It reminded me of a similar speech recently, where another minister said that split chickpeas were missing from stores because of the cold weather in Canada.
They really do believe they’re the only source of information in the country, and that nobody would know what is happening in the world if they don’t tell these stories on Mesa Redonda.
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