14ymedio, Madrid, February 29, 2024 — “In Cuba there is enough flour to drown in, but the State doesn’t have any.” Everyone knows it, and María confirms it. She spends the morning sending messages to several contacts – found through social networks – to buy the raw material, with which she makes bread, pizzas, cakes and all kinds of sweets. The offers are so overwhelming that she only has to find the best one, economically and logistically, to be able to continue supplying her business.
Emerio González Lorenzo, president of the Food Industry Business Group, admitted over the weekend that the “complex situation” – a concept applicable to transport, fuel, electricity, chicken and everything that goes wrong in the country – will produce “affectations” in the basic basket that began to be “reflected” this Saturday, according to the official, even in tourist establishments.
Although Cubans have been struggling more than a year to find anything other than small, hard and tasteless bread, the news has made them tremble. Several provinces have announced changes in distribution, from Pinar del Río, where bread has been reserved for children up to 14 years old, to Sancti Spíritus, where sources of this newspaper report that it will be available only on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
The Government says that the “financial restrictions basically due to the intensified blockade” are to blame
The Government says that “financial restrictions, due basically to the intensified blockade and the logistical limitations that Cuba suffers to bring wheat from distant markets” are to blame, and its efforts to circumvent them do not work. Sources in the import sector tell 14ymedio that the State uses mipymes that are connected to the Regime to get the product without restrictions, even if the amount isn’t enough to feed the population.
“Here is a large private MSME [Micro Small Medium Enterprise], which has several gastronomic businesses: a paladar [privately run restaurant], two candy stores…,” says the source, who asks to protect his identity and location, but has documentation that supports what he says. “They rented a place and are setting up another bakery. They are supposedly “private,” but when you look at the import papers and trace the funding, you realize that there is money that comes out of State accounts,” he says.
The State uses them, he continues, to import goods under the cover of private companies, which act legally and comply with the rules and tariffs on all imports. At the end of 2023, the Government announced the increase in import tariffs for final products and a decrease in those for raw materials,
