Crisis in Cuba: Meat for the leaders and bones for the people

SAN LUIS POTOSÍ, Mexico.- While the leaders of the Cuban regime fill their stomachs with thick steaks, the people correspond bones and limbs, as demonstrated by an agricultural fair held this weekend in Old Havana.

A truck from the slaughterhouse in the province of Artemisa arrived at the Parque del Cristo, in the Belén neighborhood, in Old Havana, to sell “meat products” that had little meat, according to the authorities. CubaNet.

The population, gathered around the vehicle, came to buy bones, beef feet, “pechito” and belly, at a price of 150 pesos per pound.

Although it is a regrettable scene, which exhibits the hunger and the lack of access to decent food, another demonstration that poverty in Cuba has reached extreme limits.

At the end of the fair, a Cuban interviewed by this newspaper, Manuel de Jesús Reyes Hernández, without even the resources to buy the bones or legs from Artemisa, showed that, outdoors, in a Havana park, he cooked what he had found in the trash.

Sweet potatoes, cassava and bones were being boiled on a makeshift stove. The 55-year-old man said he has been living on the streets for more than four decades.

Since he was 10 years old, he has lived without any help from Social Security. An orphan, “son of the Fatherland,” the Havana native said that this has always been his way of life.

In June, the NGO Food Monitor Program and the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH) denounced the serious food situation facing the island after the country was included, for the first time, in a UNICEF report on child malnutrition.

In Cuba, 9% of minors suffer from “severe child poverty,” according to the report, which means that “Cuban children have less than half of the eight food groups considered necessary for a healthy life.”

In addition, they stressed that the Cuban Government continues to delay the population census planned two years ago, a necessary count given the considerable increase in inequality and vulnerability levels.

More than 80% of people surveyed by the Food Monitor Program have seen their access to food reduced following the call Task SortingAccording to the latest text on the state of social rights in Cuba, by the OCDH, 88% of the Cuban population lives in extreme poverty, and 78% of those surveyed had deprived themselves of one or two meals a day due to lack of money or food shortages.