14ymedio, Miguel García, Holguín, 25 February 2024– This Friday, Tomás, 81 years old, felt lucky. “Today they did offer a strong course, a boiled egg, and there was pea soup that I brought home. With this cold weather, the body is asking for something like that,” he lists the food he bought at the dining room of the Family Care System (SAF) from the Pueblo Nuevo neighborhood in the city of Holguín. A subsidized trade network especially hit by the economic crisis that Cuba is going through.
“Normally, at the end of the month, there is always a shortage of protein and it is a miracle that there are still eggs”, explains Tomás to 14ymedio. For the price of 2.60 pesos per egg, the old man bought a boiled egg and also added a portion of white rice for 2.65 pesos, a portion of boiled cassava for 14.00 and a thin pea soup for 1.65. To accompany the menu, he added a soft drink, made with syrup, for 5.00 pesos.
“I don’t like to eat there, I prefer to bring food home and decide at what time to eat what,” he explains. In his humble kitchen, Tomás places the pots with the food he has bought at the SAF and decides what will be served for lunch and what he will save for dinner. He knows that he won’t have anything else to put in his mouth during the day, so he tries to organize himself.
“Sometimes there is no protein, although in my dining room the workers are quite combative and they fight with the people of the municipality to send them supplies, but one can see that it is becoming more and more difficult for them to achieve this each time”. This month, Tomás has eaten an egg and a sausage similar to blood sausage as a main course. Fruits or vegetables haven’t arrived “for years”, he says.
“The workers make an effort, they buy the spices, many times out of their own pockets, so that it has some flavor”, adds Tomás, who has been eating at the SAF since 1996, when they began to operate. A physical disability, added to aging, has made him dependent for almost three decades on a mechanism that he prides himself on being the “founder” of, and being familiar with every detail of it: its best moments and its current deterioration.
In the entire province of Holguín there are more than 6,400 people who, like Tomás, receive a food ration through the SAF canteens, according to data published by the official press at the end of 2021, but the number may have grown significantly to the same extent that inflation and shortages increase. In Holguín’s capital, the number currently exceeds 3,500 r
