Havana Cuba. – After a year of hunger and miserylast week the sale of pork meat and a module of food, cigars and rum began in the capital, while the provincial Commerce company was catching up on the distribution of delayed basic basket products.
In 2020, for the year-end festivities, the Government of the capital sold a piece (leg, shoulder or loin) of pork to each family nucleus, at 21 pesos per pound. On the same date, in 2021, it suppressed the traditional food and in exchange gave a free pound of chicken to all consumers.
This year, provinces like Cienfuegos once again sold pork at a rate of five pounds per consumer. The habaneros, for their part, can buy a ham or shoulder at 250 pesos per pound. The loin and ribs cost 235 pesos per pound.
But all the nuclei will not be able to acquire a piece of meat, according to what Julio Martínez Roque, coordinator of the Gastronomy and Food Program of the Provincial Government of Havana, told the official press. This official specified that the entity also has “a little level” of mortadella, Prodal products and seafood for sale to the capital.
“This is like eating ‘lucky rice’, whoever gets it, got it. Those who can buy are going to eat the barbecue, and those who can’t, are going to have to settle for the smell of their neighbor,” commented Rafael Benavides Acosta, a resident of Centro Habana.
Throughout the year, explains Benavides, the price of pork was prohibitive for most Cubans: “It never dropped below 350 pesos, but at this time, when everything is skyrocketing, it is already around 500. So there is no one who puts their teeth in it ”.
The queues began when the news of the sale was barely a rumor. In the Párraga neighborhood of Arroyo Naranjo, Jesús Francisco Peñalver tells that people have slept in the doorways next to the butcher shops, so as not to lose the position they occupy in the improvised lists.
“With everything and that, when they start taking turns, the ‘rebambaramba’ is armed, and whoever did 20 will end up at 90. We have fallen very low, people are killing each other for a piece of pork. And I’m not saying this figuratively, it’s that there’s nothing to eat,” lamented Peñalver.
For his part, also in Párraga, Ignacio Ramos Noa pointed out that, “at night, there is a brotherhood, everyone talks and laughs, but when dawn comes everyone knows that they have to ‘fight’ to take a turn and there no one knows each other anymore or is considered. It becomes a jungle with all kinds of animals; if you let your foot in, you never buy”.
According to a complaint by Lester Díaz González, on Diez de Octubre the butchers take advantage of the uproar unleashed and the lack of information from consumers to avoid differentiated prices and charge the maximum per pound of meat.
“The point is that people go so crazy with the possibility of solving, and the slaughter of the tail has them so concentrated, that they do not realize that money is stolen from everyone who buys a loin or rib. You can stop and peek; they are nailing it at 250 like it was leg or paddle. When you do the math, these brazen ones fine you more than 200 pesos,” Díaz said.
In addition to the pork in the butcher shops, the bodegas began to sell, to the nearly 800,000 registered populations in the capital, a bottle of national rum, three units of pasta (spaghetti or elbows) and three boxes of H. Upmann per consumer over 18 years of age.
“They are the products that little by little we are receiving from a module that was announced, but that, in reality, we ourselves do not know everything that it should bring or if it will arrive complete for all the cores. We are talking about beers, tomato paste and canned food,” said Santiago Quesada Pozo, manager of a winery in Arroyo Naranjo.
In the same way, Quesada reported that the Commerce sales units would begin to receive the shortages of bath and laundry soap, coffee, sugar, powdered milk, chicken and eggs, which “are the products of the basic basket that this year presented systematic delays in their distribution.”
In relation to coffee and chicken, according to the source, several municipalities arrive in December with a delay in their distribution of three or four months.
For many Havanans, the supply of these products at the end of the year responds to a strategy drawn up by the Government to satisfy the population on Christmas Eve and the end of the year.
“It is as if they put up with them, it is not a coincidence. Three times in a row they wait until the last minute to sell you the chicken that they haven’t given you in three months, so that people have something to eat and then they don’t get stressed. They don’t do it for good, for people to solve; They do it because they are afraid of the protests and they know that Cubans cover their mouths with food,” Marlén Arencibia Saldívar snapped.
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