Cubans do not come out of one disappointment to enter another: the coffee that is sold in a rationed way has not yet reached the markets in this month of January. The product has not appeared in the warehouses for weeks due to “the existing difficulties with the shipping companies”, justified the Government this Saturday.
The Business Group of the Agrifood Industry stressed in its social networks that the coffee from the family basket “presents distribution problems in the months of December and January”, due to the fact that part of the product must be imported from other countries, after the plummeting of the national grain harvest.
However, the official message specifies that even when “national production” was met, a plan that is adjusted downwards each year in order to achieve it, “there is a level that is ensured with imported coffee that has not arrived in the country due to existing difficulties with the shipping companies”.
Cuba’s annual coffee production was 60,000 tons in 1959, it has plummeted since then to below 6,000 tons a year.
The instability in the distribution of the product has been persistent, which has caused outrage among consumers to increase, especially after the official announcements of an upcoming sale of coffee that has not actually materialized in the stores that distribute the standardized basic basket.
This was what happened in the second week of January when a saleswoman at the store on Calle E between 23 and 21, in El Vedado, Havana, opted for put up two big banners with the phrase: “There is no coffee”, tired of repeating it with her voice to customers who come in asking about the product and with no idea when it will be available.
A clerk at the store on Calle E between 23 and 21, in Havana’s El Vedado, chose to put up two large signs with the phrase: “There is no coffee”
“I put up the posters so that people would be warned,” the state employee said with annoyance, while recalling that the capital’s official press published at the beginning of the year that the distribution of coffee through the book corresponding to January was imminent.
Despite this scenario, the Agri-food Industry assured that “the industrial processing of coffee” has already concluded and “work is being done on the distribution of the remaining territories before the end of January” without specifying whether the product that has already been processed contains raw material. one hundred percent national.
The Cuba-Café Company had warned in December delays in import arrivals and in the deliveries of the businesses that process the grain, which harmed in that month “the retail distribution of blended coffee for the family basket.”
And not only is there a delay in the distribution of coffee, milk for people on medical diets is still missing. As justified by the company, “their delivery has not been possible due to the lack of financing to insure them.”
Since last September, the Ministry of the Food Industry announced that due to the “delay in arrivals” of powdered milk, people who had been assigned a medical diet would not be included in the distribution.
The only alternative that affected people have, said the agency, is to depend on the “availability” of other products derived from soybeans that are sold freely, an option consulted, they say, with “specialists from the Ministry of Public Health”.
The cuts in delivery, the Government reported then, will continue in the month of October, after clarifying that children are the priority in the delivery of the precious food, but the truth is that people with medical diets have already gone almost half a year without milk. .
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