A drop slid down my leg, I maneuvered it into the hollow between my ankle and my shoe and did a thousand pirouettes so my high school classmates wouldn't notice. For months, my family had had only mineral oil for cooking, thanks to pharmacist relative who was able to sneak it from his work. I remember it heating to a white foam in the pot and the food tinged with the golden color of a photograph, ideal for food magazines. But our bodies could not absorb that kind of fat, made for creating lotions, perfumes or creams. It passed right through our intestines and dripped, dripped, dripped... My panties were stained, but at least we got a break from food that was just boiled, and could try another, slightly roasted.
We were quite fortunate to have that semblance of "butter" that someone stole for us, because in the nineties many others had to distill engine oil for use in their kitchens. Perhaps that's why we Cubans are traumatized by this product extracted from sunflowers, soybeans or olives. The price of a quart of oil in the market has become our own popular indicator of well-being versus crisis, in the thermometer that takes the temperature of scarcities. With an ever shrinking culinary culture, from Pinar del Rio to Guantanamo, most stoves know only recipes for fried foods. Hence, pork fat, or buttery liquids with high-sounding names such as "The Cook" or "Golden Ace," prove essential in our daily lives.
When, a few days ago -- with no prior warning -- the price of vegetable oil in hard currency stores rose by 11.6%, the annoyance was very strong, even more so than when fuel prices rose. Many of us don't have cars to show us that convertible pesos are continually turned into less and less gasoline, but we all face a plate every day where the prices of staple foods have soared. That this happens with no accompanying public protest, no discontented housewives raising a ruckus beating on their pots and pans, no long articles in the press complaining of the abuse, is harder to swallow than a meal with no fat. I'm more embarrassed by this tacit acceptance of rising prices than I was of the thread of mineral oil snaking down my calf before the mocking eyes of my classmates.
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The Castro regime in his Second Report on Implementation of the Millennium Goals sends to United Nations, July 2005, said of the ration book: “it guarantees approximately half the per capita calories consumption of the Cuban population”
The ration book provides only 1,000 per capita daily calories, good for 10 to 15 days of monthly food requirements, depending on eating habits.
Cuban Ration Book
Monthly Ration per person:
1- Ground soya beef 8 ounces plus 8oz of other meats (hot dogs, mortadella)
2 - Eggs 10 units
3 - Fish 10 ounces
4 - Bread one roll daily (3 ounces)
5 - 1 liter of milk daily for children under 7 years
6 - 1 liter soya yogurt for children between 7 and 13 years
7 - Rice 5 lb
8 - Potatoes 4 lb (dropped from the ration book November 2009)
9 - Sugar 5 lb
10 - Coffee 4 ounces (mixed with peas)
11 - Chicken half-pound
12 - Vegetable oil 16 ounces
13 - Spaghetti (dried pasta) half-pound
14 - Beans 10 ounces
15 - Peas 10 ounces (dropped from the ration book November 2009)
16 – Salt 6 ounces
Source: Distribution list at the retail stores run by the MINCIN.
The domestic food crisis is characterized by low productivity and a great lack of liquidity in hard currency. Who would have imagined that Cuba would become an importer of food, even importing sugar, of all things, from the United States, of all places?
Instead of asking for food riots in Cuba, Ms Sanchez would do everyone a favor if she would request a few acres from the government (like thousands of other Cubans have done) and begin producing some food instead of living off planting the seeds of discontent for a salary.
You get your information of CIA fact book gets its information of regime’s statistic which is false, fake, inflated. No international organization publishing statistics from totalitarian regimes can get direct statistics from companies or institutions because all of them belong to regime; so, those “facts” are false.
I get my information first from my personal experience; I lived there from 1965 until 1999 and second from regime’s “National Statistics Office”. This Office said that average salaries in Cuba are 429 pesos/month last year. Knowing that regime’s official exchange rate dollar/peso is 24 pesos by dollar is easy to calculate how many dollars get Cubans per month: $17.87…… pure math and common sense.
Here the link
http://www.one.cu/aec2009/esp/20080618_tabla_cuadro.htm