It will take more than a bunch of bananas to recover
By Glenda Boza Ibarra (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – Photos of bananas being handed out as a bonus to high school teachers in Guantanamo went viral on social media this week and became a joke that led to dozens of memes.
The Facebook post was deleted after it went viral, but it isn’t the first post that demonstrates the severe shortages Cubans suffer and how government “bonuses” take advantage of this scarcity.
A problem that we can’t stomach
Not bananas from the Canary Islands, or from Costa Rica, or even platano macho (plantain). Teachers in Guantanamo were given burro bananas or fongo (as they’re known in the eastern part of Cuba). This variety of banana is native to Cuba and is known for having a thick peel. It is the worst kind of banana you can find in Cuba, but easy to grow.
People either fry it when it’s still green to make chicharritas, or they are eaten on their own when ripe or with sugar, especially during hard times of hunger and poverty. It’s a food that “saves you”.
Cubans still remember the recipe of “minced banana peel” which became popular during the so-called Special Period crisis of the 1990’s. Thirty years later, it’s this “lifesaving” food that proves this cyclic scarcity, which is almost a constant in Cubans’ lives and a cause of great grief.
Right now, when a handful of seven or ten burro bananas cost between 100 and 250 pesos (depending on where they’re being sold) and a plantain can cost 35 CUP, going home with eight free bananas can be a “blessing” for many; especially if you bear in mind the fact the average monthly wage is 4000 pesos (around $17 USD) and when the rest of your wage is spent in a week on food like rice, chicken, eggs and cooking oil.
Faced with this reality, jokes that centered around the teachers who posed smiling with their handful of bananas, without taking a look at the structural causes of the situation and without putting the Government at the heart of putting them in this situation, are unfair and lack any empathy.
If any of them were to be asked, in the privacy of their own homes, just how much a handful of bananas had helped them, they would probably tell you a lot.
The education sector has been one of the hardest hit by rampant inflation in Cuba.
Even though statistics from Cuba’s Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) say that teaching staff has increased by 31,638 since the 2018/2019 academic year to 2021/2022, Ministry of Education officials have confirmed in September in 2023 that there is a shortage of teachers, and that lots of the time, students aren’t being taught entire subjects for