14ymedio, Havana, February 2, 2024 — At the end of January, only six Cuban provinces and the special municipality of Isla de la Juventud had received the libreta (ration book), the official press acknowledged on Thursday. For the population, however, it is not the libreta that worries them, but the fact that the food isn’t arriving on time at the bodegas (ration stores).
According to the official Tribuna de La Habana, due to delays in printing and the low availability of raw materials, the Ministry of Internal Trade has only managed to distribute 69% of the more than 4 million libretas required on the Island, despite the fact that since last September it had the budget for their manufacture.
The December 20 deadline imposed for the libreta could not be met, something that the company Ediciones Caribe had warned from the beginning
The December 20 deadline for the libreta could not be met, something that had been warned from the beginning by the company Ediciones Caribe, contracted for the printing. They could only prepare the booklet but not the pages with the list of products for each member of the household and their official registration address (Oficoda). With these delays, the authorities said, the deliveries of the libreta could not be done in time.
To the citizens, however, the libreta “doesn’t matter.” Manuel, a retiree who lives in Central Havana, told this newspaper that “with the delay of food in the bodega, it doesn’t matter if they give us the libreta or not, because there is nothing to buy anyway.”
According to Manuel, the gossip in the bodega predicts a February similar to the previous month, when “on the 20th we still did not have rice, and other products from December were missing. Even the bodeguero is worried because he has not been given in
