HAVANA TIMES – Someone I deeply love says that Donald Trump is the hungriest person in the Universe. Hunger, as we well know, is not only a physical issue derived from lack of food. The worst hunger is the insatiable one, the one that pursues something, usually power, and thus is capable of doing anything, of transgressing even the most sacred human and divine laws.
But physical hunger also exists, and in Cuba, in 2024, we have all possible hungers.
February is about to end, and in most neighborhoods of Havana, the ultra-basic products offered in the ration store haven’t been sold. We are aware that what they sell there is symbolic; however, we also know that almost everyone needs it to support the great task of feeding oneself and any family members in this country. It’s a few pounds of rice at a cheaper price —luckily seven— than those that will have to be bought on the street at a price that exceeds 200 pesos in a country where the minimum monthly wage is 2,100 and most people do not earn more than 5,000 pesos a month.
It’s not my intention to start listing products and prices. Perhaps it would be an interesting initiative —though terrifying— for El TOQUE, in addition to its useful currency exchange table, to add one with the prices of basic products of the impoverished Cuban diet. Thus, those living outside of Cuba could know how prices behave here, and, incidentally, the Government would have the opportunity to blame the media for the economic disaster we are experiencing and for the outrageous inflation we have been experiencing since the brilliant idea of economic reordering (in 2021); although, truth be told, long before.
I speak of Havana and I speak from the most central municipalities, but I know very well that just moving a few kilometers away from the center is enough to see that things are worse, that poverty increases, and that the gaps widen. I wouldn’t want to imagine how prices and salaries behave in the small towns of the eastern provinces, for example. Who in those areas will have access to the elitist MLC (magnetic dollar) stores where, by the way, a variety of offerings is not the priority?
Most of my week I live in Lechuga, in the Managua district, in Arroyo Naranjo. I’m just 30 km away from downtown Havana, and yet, upon arriving in Lechuga, it seems like I inhabit a kind of parallel reality. In this area, people have cell phones and internet connection, like anyone else, but time seems to pass in different ways. There are several dairies ne
