Old towels, pieces of sheets or T-shirts are what save, right now, the cleaning of the floors in Cuban houses. In the absence of the floor blankets, which have been missing for months from the shops, the families allocate pieces of clothing to put on the traditional mopping pole, the protagonist of domestic hygiene on this Island.
“It seems that we are going back to the past,” a lady was heard saying this Friday outside a state store where they sold chlorine in bulk. The woman, old enough to remember the hard years of the Special Period, recalled how in the 90s her house ran out of towels: “they didn’t sell and the few we had we had to use to clean.”
“We have been falling behind for months on food, detergent, and the most basic products, but for a long time they have not sold the bedspreads to mop anywhere, I have not even seen them in foreign currency stores,” he explains to 14ymedio a resident of the Havana neighborhood of Cerro.
“We have been falling behind for months on food, detergent, and the most basic products but for a long time they have not sold the bedspreads to mop anywhere”
With an official price of 15 pesos, the so-called cloth depends on the import of raw materials for its manufacture. At the end of 2019 the authorities warned that there were problems with the supply and in provinces such as Villa Clara the possibility of selling them only through the rationed market was even explored. The shortage triggered the price of floor blankets in the informal market, which now reaches 150 CUP.
On social media, a meme captures the seriousness of the situation with the characteristic touch of humor in these images. “The order to break pullovers has been given!”, Reads a text alluding to the words of Miguel Díaz-Canel during the popular protests on July 11. But in this case, instead of the unarmed protesters, the victims are all those shirts or T-shirts that serve to clean the floor.
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