“It wasn’t until five in the afternoon that we started selling the cake Mother’s Day”, clarified this Saturday one of the employees of the sweet shop in Havana from Zanja y Belascoaín, managed by the state company Sylvain. Outside the premises, a group of people had started lining up very early to try to get with a product that a few years ago hundreds of thousands of units were made at subsidized prices.
This year, due to the shortage of flour, sugar and eggs, in the Cuban capital the authorities announced that they would only the sale of 23,000 of these cakes, traditionally made with panetela, meringue and some jam inside. If a few decades ago every family knew that their cake It would arrive, religiously on the second Sunday of May, at the bakery in the rationed market, now only those who have the time to stand in line and the 500 pesos it costs in state stores can enjoy it.
While the private sector has been promoting offers for days, most of them to pay from abroad, which include candies with whipped cream, meringue or chocolate coating, there was little information in official stores about the sale of these candies. “We didn’t know anything, but this week the order came that we had to allocate some of the raw material that we normally use for daily sales to make a few cakes,” he tells 14ymedio an employee of another Sylvain on 23rd street in El Vedado.
On Galiano street, a fair for Mother’s Day offered a liter of vegetable oil for 1,000 pesos, a can of beer for 140 and to prepare some drinks this Sunday, only a bottle of whiskey was for sale.
“They are not like the ones from before, here we are making them rectangular, not round, and they will only have meringue on the top, not on the sides,” he acknowledges. “Anyway it’s an option because a cake In a private business this weekend you won’t get below 3,000 pesos,” he warns. “Here there are people who dialed since last night, but we didn’t start selling until the afternoon.”
On Galiano street, a fair for Mother’s Day offered a liter of vegetable oil for 1,000 pesos, a can of beer for 140 and to prepare some drinks this Sunday, only a bottle of imported whiskey was for sale, also for 1,000. Despite the music that flooded the entire avenue and the children’s games organized by the National Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation (Inder), the atmosphere was more of apathy than celebration.
“I looked out and when I saw that a pound of bacon costs 550 pesos and also looks half fainted, I was scared,” said a woman with a small child in her arms who was looking among the tents set up on the wide street “something to repair for this Sunday” in the typical family reunion that takes place in each house.
But not only the prices overshadow the celebration. The massive exodus that Cuba has experienced in the last year has left many mothers separated from their children. The distance, the video calls from other parts of the world and the nostalgia for those who left marked the entire day. Added to this are the more than 1,000 political prisoners on the island, most of them detained and prosecuted for the protests of July 11, 2021.
A group of organizations, among which is the Cuban Alliance for Inclusion, the Association of Mothers and Families for Amnesty and Democratic Christian Women of Cuba have released a statement in which they assure that Cuban mothers “are women who are dealing with day to day, with a difficult life and who try to rebuild their world, even having been, on occasions, abandoned and relegated by society, institutions or, perhaps, by those closest to them who should have been by their side but who failed them” .
In the text, he adds that the mothers of the Island “have exceeded the limits of overcoming; they have everything against them, but they have not let the wind break their branches, they have rescued their strength to protect their home, they have recomposed and They’ve moved on with their family.”
________________________
Collaborate with our work:
The team of 14ymedio He is committed to doing serious journalism that reflects the reality of deep Cuba. Thank you for accompanying us on this long road. We invite you to continue supporting us, but this time becoming a member of our newspaper. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
