In mid-November, around 27 weekly flights arrived at Jardines del Rey, which rose to 35 during the month of January. (Facebook)
14ymedio, Havana, 26 January 2022 — The Cuban authorities have taken advantage of the slight increase in flights to the Jardines del Rey airport (Ciego de Ávila) to advertise Cayo Coco, one of the main tourist enclaves in the country, as a “safe destination for travelers of different nationalities despite the epidemiological complexities in the world”.
As published by the Cuban News Agency, after the start of the high season and with the end of a large part of the restrictions due to the covid-19 pandemic, in mid-November, around 27 weekly flights arrived at Jardines del Rey, which were raised to 35 during the month of January.
The official of the Provincial Delegation of the Ministry of Tourism, Lubia Olivera Espinosa, stated that most of the aircraft came from Canada and Russia, although there were also flights from Mexico.
In line with the announcement made last week in Madrid by the Cuban Minister of Tourism, Juan Carlos García Granda, to make more hotel rooms available to travelers in 2022 Olivera Espinosa announced that Cayo Coco has reopened new hotels, adding up to a total of 15 establishments.
Among them are Kempinski Cayo Guillermo, Iberostar Daiquirí, Iberostar Selection Esmeralda and Coral Level, belonging to the Gaviota Hotel Group. The official note points out that “the development of hotel facilities, planned out to the year 2030, continues with the construction of new accommodation sites in Cayo Paredón Grande.”
The Cuban government, which has minimized the impact of the omicron variant on the island, emphasizes the control measures carried out with tourists. “As part of the insurance for tourist operations, up to 500 daily samples are processed for PCR-RT,” said Tatiana Artiles Herrera, head of the laboratory at the Roberto Rodríguez hospital in Morón.
The official press does not mention that Air Canada, although it maintains its connections with Cayo Coco, Holguín, Santa Clara or Varadero, will suspend its flights to Havana until April 30. The decision, made public on January 5, was due to the wave of covid-19 in the world caused by the omicron strain.
Nor do they mention the tourism debacle in Cuba; in the first 11 months of 2021the country received just 6.5% of the travelers it received in the same period of 2019.
The pandemic, which caused harsh restrictions around the world between 2019 and 2020, ceased to be an excuse last year, as other Caribbean destinations recovered much of their tourist trade. The Dominican Republic, specifically, achieved 73% of the tourists it received between January and November 2019, and Mexico ended 2021 with the high figure of 12.5 million visitors.
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Dr. Daymara Helen Pérez Alabedra, on the right in the image, was kidnapped in Haiti on January 13. (Facebook)
14ymedio, Havana, 23 January 2022 — Cuban doctor Daymara Helen Pérez Alabedra, who had been kidnapped in Haiti on January 13, has already been released, as confirmed this Sunday to 14ymedio by telephone from Las Tunas by her mother, María Alabedra.
“They have already released my daughter. She is already at home. They did not harm her physically,” Alabedra said in a brief communication, also noting that she had spoken “three times” with the doctor. Hours later, the Cuban embassy in Haiti announced through its social networks the release of the health worker and that she had already communicated with her relatives on the island.
Pérez was intercepted by armed men who demanded “100,000 dollars in exchange for her release” but the mother of the health worker did not comment on the details of the negotiation.
As Alabedra had explained in an interview with this newspaper on January 21, Fred Jasmin, director of the Notre Dame hospital, in the city of Petit-Goave, was personally dealing with the negotiation to free her daughter. This Sunday, the local media Haiti24  announced that as part of the negotiations, the healthcare worker’s family paid $10,000 to the kidnappers, but they did not release her at that time.
Pérez arrived in Haiti with the Cuban medical mission, of which she was a part for three years. She then returned to the island for nine months and, according to her mother, returned with a work contract at the Notre Dame hospital. “She came on January 29, 2020 and left on October 19. This Thursday marked 15 months of that separation.”
“The place where she worked is stopped, there are many demonstrations to demand her release. Here in Chaparra, the town where she was born and lived, in the province of Las Tunas, everyone is in the same, very attentive. Friends that she has in other countries, too,” Alabedra said then.
According to Le filet info, with sources close to the medical brigade, the Government of Cuba decided to reduce the delegation of doctors deployed in that country and repatriated 78 health workers after hearing the news of the kidnapping.
This information was refuted by the Haitian Minister of Health, Lauré Adrien, who assured that the repatriated group was made up of people who had completed the mission or were going on vacation.
Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry acknowledged a serious problem with armed gangs, which have increased kidnappings and massacres in popular neighborhoods. According to official records, at least 1,000 people were deprived of their liberty in 2021.
In mid-December of last year, Cuban engineers Andrik Alfredo Abad Reinosa and Enides Galano Silva were kidnapped on their way to do paperwork at the Immigration Office in the Haitian capital. At that time it was reported that the Autoplaza company was negotiating with the kidnappers and, according to the Sputnik agency, their release was achieved on January 3.
In Kenya, surgeon Landy Rodríguez Hernández and general medicine specialist Assel Herrera Correa continue to be held by kidnappers. The Cuban doctors were intercepted by alleged members of the Somali jihadist group Al Shabab on April 12, 2019, when they were on their way to work at the hospital in the city of Mandera, in northeastern Kenya and on the border with Somalia. There is no news of their condition, beyond the promise of the Kenyan government to guarantee a “safe release.”
Cuban doctors have worked in Haiti since 1998, when a first brigade was sent after Hurricane George. They were part of the team deployed to support the victims of the 2010 earthquake and care for patients infected by the cholera outbreak that emerged months later. And they have also been supportive after Hurricane Matthew in 2016.
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

In its beginnings, the ’weekly packet’ gave Cuban officialdom numerous headaches and enormous gratifications to the viewers, who came to be counted by millions throughout the island. (14ymedio)
14ymedio, Havana, 25 January 2022 — The weekly packet, that compendium of audiovisuals, music and digital material that for more than a decade has been an alternative to official television, has risen in price this January and in Havana it will cost 70 pesos each week. Customers are alarmed by this increase and also the loss of quality, due to excessive censorship, which marks the content.
“Important information to all Mega Vision clients, weekly packet,” starts a note included in the product that is being distributed this week in various points of the Cuban capital. “Due to economic changes” linked to the new dollar rate in the informal market, there is a “weekly packet price adjustment starting Monday: 70 CUP (Cuban pesos).” In neighborhoods like Centro Habana it even reaches 100.
The notice has sparked the annoyance of many consumers, who until now paid about 50 pesos for all the folders divided by theme that make up the compendium. A price to which the cost of the courier could be added in case the client preferred to receive it at home.
“I’m not going to pay that amount because it’s getting worse and worse,” laments Manolo, a retiree from Cotorro who had already noticed “the loss of quality” of the materials collected. “Many documentaries have bad subtitles, the copies of the films are bad and to top it all, they have fewer and fewer things that have to do with history and politics.”
“It’s not a matter of twenty pesos difference,” he continues. “It is the enormous difference between what was received in the beginning and the current sloppiness. Until recently they had at least the newscasts of many channels in Florida but they removed them. They have already gone past being servile, they can’t count on me to keep them in business.”
In its beginnings, the weekly packet was a source of numerous headaches to Cuban officialdom and enormous rewards to viewers, who came to number in the millions throughout the Island. Being able to access documentaries, films and television series that were not broadcast on national television consecrated this audiovisual compilation above the official grid.
From its early years, the managers of the business instituted the “zero politics, zero violence, zero pornography” rule that allowed them to circumvent official censorship, although the weekly packet was never appreciated by cultural institutions, which accused them of promoting frivolity and tastelessness.
La mochila, (the backpack) was the official antidote that the authorities found against the “poison that they are putting into the heads” of the young people in the packet. However, the underground offer won the pulse. The alternative prepared by the Cuban State and distributed through the Computer Youth Club, despite its enormous resources, hardly found an audience.
During this time, there have been several attempts to raise the initial price, which was then one convertible peso (25 Cuban pesos). “They tried to put it at 75 CUP a year ago, but people threw a tremendous tantrum and they had to lower it to 50. Overall, with the same amount of money they lowered it, quality also fell and censorship grew,” explains Manolo.
A messenger linked to the Mega Vision production house assured 14ymedio that “the previous price could not be maintained.” Distributed to private businesses, the packet also survives by advertising restaurants, photo studios and musicians who pay to be included in its popular compilations. “Paid ads fell with this pandemic because many stores were closed, we can’t make ends meet with what each customer pays just to watch.”
But the packet does not seem to be hit only by the flight of advertisers and the disappointment of the audience. “Since internet access arrived on mobile phones in December 2018, more and more people consume materials directly from the internet. They watch programs through Facebook, they do a lot of tricks to lower the megabytes and there are even more and more families who pay for their Netflix subscription from Miami,” says the messenger. “With that it is very difficult to compete.”
And he explains: “Many Fire Stick and Roku are arriving that anyone can hook up to their television and access a wealth of audiovisual material. They share it through Wi-Fi between several families and that’s where I think the business of the future is coming, because the packet, more and more, is serving people without an internet connection.”
Others consider that it still “does business and you can take advantage of it.”
“I have a good clientele who are looking for soap operas and reality shows, they are not interested in politics,” acknowledges Barbarita, another distributor of the packet in the municipality of Playa. “These are people who want to turn on the television in the morning and watch that type of program.”
“Cooking courses, music videos and video games are in high demand,” he says. “My clientele has not complained about the lack of newscasts or other topics, rather they would like it to include more music and spaces for participation, such as singing contests.” Barbarita believes that “70 pesos a week is still cheap, it costs less than a pound of beans.”
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Yunior García Aguilera at a press conference after his arrival in Madrid. (EFE/Fernando Villar)
14ymedio, Madrid, 24 January 2022 — The playwright Yunior García Aguilera will request asylum in Spain, where he arrived in mid-November 2021, after leaving the island forced by the siege around his apartment that he was subjected to by Cuban State Security. The founder of the Archipiélago platform traveled to Madrid with a tourist visa granted by the Spanish Government, valid for 90 days and not valid travel to another country. However, more than two months have passed and the opposition figure admits having realized that he cannot return as soon as he expected, he said in an interview with the newspaper El País that was published this Sunday.
“Since my arrival in Madrid, my theater group in Cuba has been closed and the actors have been fired. My works are prohibited. The case against me is still open. As soon as I set foot in the Havana airport they have excuses to send me to jail for 27 or 30 years, as they have done with other protesters. Going back now is not a real possibility. It would be suicide,” he says from his new host city.
On his arrival in Madrid, García Aguilera said that his intention was to exhaust the duration of the visa, recover mentally and physically from the wear and tear suffered in the weeks prior to the Civic March for Change, of which he was one of the promoters, and return to the Island willing to continue advancing the demands for freedom for political prisoners and the dialogue to initiate a change towards democracy in Cuba.
However, since he left, his Trébol Teatro group has been closed and he notes that before leaving Cuba, State Security threatened him with 27 years in the Combinado del Este prison.
In the interview, García Aguilera talks about his landing in Madrid’s daily life. After an arrival under the spotlight, with spaces in the Spanish news and pages in the newspapers, the playwright has had to start an ordinary life and says that he survives “honestly” thanks to some collaborations with the media and the support of the Cuban exile. As he explains, the coat he was wearing during his conversation with the El País reporter was given to him and he is willing to work at whatever is necessary to maintain the small apartment where he lives in Lavapiés.
García Aguilera says they he must tae some precautions, such as keeping his exact address secret – “State Security has tentacles everywhere” – but he is delighted with his host neighborhood. Less than a kilometer from Puerta del Sol, Lavapiés is an area in which more than 88 nationalities coexist and which, despite the gentrification process that has been going on for a few years, preserves the tradition of the oldest residents of the capital, together with the multiculturalism of its new inhabitants.
“On Sundays, the Blacks take out their drums and play them. That reminds me of my land,” says the playwright, who emphasizes that he feels very grateful for his current austere life, because he has had the warmth of the Cuban community, which has even helped him to protect himself from the cold Madrid winter, which these days registers temperatures between 28 and 48 degrees Fahrenheit.
“In politics, what is real is what is not seen” he says to describe the “discreet” work which, he maintains, he has continued to carry out for democracy in Cuba. This links to one of the most unpleasant episodes that he has experienced since he arrived in Spain, an act of repudiation that he suffered in the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid when he tried to relate his experiences in a presentation organized by an association of the same Faculty.
García Aguilera attributes the action to “young people from the United Left” (one of the member parties of the United We Can coalition, currently in government) and considers that many of these people preserve the unreal myth of the Cuban Revolution as an ideal of justice and equality. The playwright urges people “of good will who dare not call Cuba a dictatorship” to “understand that this romantic vision is doing Cubans a lot of harm” and asks the international community to abandon its “hypocrisy” and its “lukewarmness” toward “that brutal and cruel dictatorship that rips out the hearts of Cubans,” as he did since the most recent column published in 14ymedio, where he has a fortnightly collaboration.
Despite this bad time, García Aguilera is happy in his new city and confesses that he is happy when he can give himself a little treat such as buying a chocolate bar, some pork or visiting the bookstores in his neighborhood, always with caution, since some Cuban media have come to spread images of him buying cheap clothes with the aim of painting him “as a consumer who is happy eating ham,” he says.
At night, sometimes until 5 in the morning, he speaks with Cuba through video calls with his 10-year-old son, who continues to live in Havana, with the Archipiélago moderators and the relatives of the political prisoners.
Although his exile is expected to be longer than initially announced, García Aguilera insists that “he will never give up returning to his country. Being Cuban is a chronic condition that has no cure. I cannot forget that I am a Cuban who wants to return to Cuba.”
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

Mailin Sánchez, wife of Yosvany García Caso, a ’plantado’ on hunger strike in Holguín, in a video with her three children. (Screen capture)
14ymedio, Havana, 24 January 2022 — Yosvany Rosell García Caso, for whom the Prosecutor’s Office requested 30 years in the trial in Holguín for sentencing on January 14, has been on a hunger strike for ten days in protest of what he considers an unjust sentence. As confirmed to this newspaper by his wife, Mailin Sánchez, he is the only one who continues to be a plantado* out of the defendants who went on a hunger strike in the same prison.
Mailin Sánchez says that this Sunday a State Security agent called her to tell her that she had to appear at the prison on Monday morning, but that her husband did not want to see her. “He does not want to receive visits, he did not want to talk to me, he continues in the position of being a plantado in respnse to the unjust request of 30 years,” she says.
Sánchez says that her husband is in the infirmary because his health is deteriorating. “I spoke with the doctor and she tells me that the analyses that they did today are already altered, there is already damage to his health, that he has lost a lot of weight,” she says, adding that García Caso “does not have the right to calls at this time.”
“They are destroying this family,” Mailin Sánchez denounces in a video, accompanied by her three children, where she also asserts that her family “wants him free and at home now.”
In addition to García Caso, two other political prisoners continue on hunger strike: the artist and leader of the San Isidro Movement Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, in Havana, and Chadrián Vila Sequin, in Matanzas.
At the same time, the case of Walnier Luis Aguilera Rivera, one of those arrested after the July 11 demonstration in the La Güinera neighborhood, Havana, sentenced to 23 years in prison, has been brought before the United Nations.
The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH) has denounced his case before the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Aguilera Rivera, who suffers from mental retardation, according to his father, was sentenced on December 23 for the crime of “sedition” and is in the Combinado del Este maximum security prison.
“The denial of a forensic medical/psychiatric test in the investigative and judicial phase certified the predisposition to convict him,” explains the OCDH in a statement published this Monday, detailing that the young man was arbitrarily arrested on July 20 and his whereabouts were unknown for seven days.
“He was confined alongside common criminals,” says the Madrid-based organization. “He was prevented from having immediate access to his parents, to the medications he requires, and to lawyers.”
The clinical history of Aguilera Rivera, continues the Observatory, “is evidence that he has required special psychiatric treatment since he was a child.” The Diagnosis and Orientation Center certified since 2014 that he had “special educational needs, due to suffering from intellectual disability.” For this reason, and since then, “he is permanently medicated” and, in addition, he was not required to undertake Compulsory Military Service, for “borderline intellectual functioning” and being an “unfit subject” to assume natural or daily obligations.
The OCDH also emphasizes that the “criminal figure of sedition” serves the regime to “sow terror in the Cuban population,” since “it foresees sentences that range between 10 and 20 years in prison, or the possible death penalty.”
Among the four trials for 11J that will take place this week in Cuba, for a total of 39 detainees, is that of the opposition figure Félix, who will be tried in Matanzas. Accused of “public disorder” and “attack,” Navarro faces a sentence of 15 years in prison.
Navarro, 68 years old and a former prisoner of the Black Spring of 2003, was one of the few from the Group of 75, after his release in 2011, who refused to leave the Island.
He was arrested, along with other prominent figures of the opposition, in the heat of the demonstrations on July 11. Specifically, as recorded by the group Justicia 11J, his arrest occurred on the morning of the next day, when he was inquiring about the situation of other detainees in the municipality of Perico.
President of the Pedro Luis Boitel Abraham Party for Democracy and a member of the Democratic Action Unity Table (Muad), the opponent is being held in the Combinado del Sur prison in Matanzas, where he has suffered from covid-19. In September he staged a hunger strike for three weeks in protest against the accusations against him.
In the same trial, his daughter Saily Navarro, a Lady in White and a promoter of Cuba Decide, is facing a trial with the prosecutor, Idania Miranda Ferrer, asking for 11 years for the crimes of “public disorder,” “disrespect” and “attack.” Currently, she is under house arrest.
According to a complaint by the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Press (ICLEP), its executive director, Alberto Corzo, and several reporters from the independent outlet Cocodrilo Callejero are “besieged in their homes” in Matanzas by agents of the National Revolutionary Police and State Security.
If something is surprising about this week’s trials, it is the, once again, high sentences that weigh on the 21 accused in Havana, between the 19 years in prison that Liliana Oropesa Ferrer faces and the 26 years requested by the prosecutor of the Municipal Court of October 10, Gustavo José Mayo González, for Alejaime Lambert Reyes.
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*Translator’s note: A ’plantado’ — literally ’planted’ — is a term with a long history in Cuba and is used to describe a political prisoner who refuses to cooperate in any way with their incarceration.
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

People buying in a Cuban ration store that sells the ’standardized family basket’. (14ymedio, Archive)
14ymedio, Havana, 23 January 2022 — Cubans haven’t finished with one disappointment before facing another: coffee sold in the ration stores (called bodegas in Cuba) has not yet appeared in those markets in the month of January. The product has been missing from the bodegas due to “existing difficulties with the shipping companies,” the Government justified on Saturday.
The Business Group of the Agri-Food Industry stressed on its social networks that the coffee in the family basket “presents distribution problems in the months of December and January,” due to the fact that part of the product must be imported from other countries, after the drop in ground coffee from the national harvest.
However, the official message specifies that even when “national production” was met, a plan that is adjusted downwards each year in order to achieve it, “there is a level that is ensured with imported coffee, but that has not arrived in the country due to existing difficulties with the shipping companies.”
Cuba’s annual coffee production was 60,000 tons in 1959, it has plummeted since then to below 6,000 tons a year.
The instability in the distribution of the product has been a persistent problem, increasing the outrage among consumers, especially after the official announcements of an upcoming sale of coffee which has not actually materialized in the bodegas that distribute the standardized basic basket.
This is how it came to be that, in the second week of January, a shop assistant on Calle E between 23 and 21, in Havana’s El Vedado, chose to put up two large signs with the phrase: “There is no coffee,” tired of repeating it with her voice to every customer who comes in asking about the product, while she has no idea when it will be available.
“I put up the posters so that people would be warned,” the state employee said with annoyance, while recalling that the capital’s official press published, at the beginning of the year, an announcement saying that the distribution of coffee through the ration book corresponding to January was imminent.
Despite this scenario, the Agri-food Industry assured that “the industrial processing of coffee” has already concluded and “work is being done on the distribution of the remaining territories before the end of January” without specifying whether the product that has already been processed contains one hundred percent domestic raw material.
The Cuba-Café Company had warned in December of delays in the arrival of imports and in the deliveries from the businesses that process the beans, which harmed “the retail distribution of blended coffee for the family basket” in that month. [’Blended’ coffee refers to the fact that the beans are often mixed with other material, such as dried peas.]
And not only is there a delay in the distribution of coffee, milk for people on medical diets is still missing. As justified by the company, “its delivery has not been possible due to the lack of financing to insure it.”
Since last September, the Ministry of the Food Industry announced that due to the “delay in arrivals” of powdered milk, people who had been assigned a medical diet would not be included in the distribution.
The only alternative that affected people have, said the agency, is to depend on the “availability” of other products derived from soybeans that are sold freely, an option developed, they say, in consulttion with “specialists from the Ministry of Public Health.”
The cuts in delivery, the Government reported then, would continue in the month of October, after clarifying that children are the priority in the delivery of the precious food, but the truth is that people with medical diets have already gone almost half a year without milk.
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
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People buying in a Cuban ration store that sells the ’standardized family basket’. (14ymedio, Archive)
14ymedio, Havana, 23 January 2022 — Cubans haven’t finished with one disappointment before facing another: coffee sold in the ration stores (called bodegas in Cuba) has not yet appeared in those markets in the month of January. The product has been missing from the bodegas due to “existing difficulties with the shipping companies,” the Government justified on Saturday.
The Business Group of the Agri-Food Industry stressed on its social networks that the coffee in the family basket “presents distribution problems in the months of December and January,” due to the fact that part of the product must be imported from other countries, after the drop in ground coffee from the national harvest.
However, the official message specifies that even when “national production” was met, a plan that is adjusted downwards each year in order to achieve it, “there is a level that is ensured with imported coffee, but that has not arrived in the country due to existing difficulties with the shipping companies.”
Cuba’s annual coffee production was 60,000 tons in 1959, it has plummeted since then to below 6,000 tons a year.
The instability in the distribution of the product has been a persistent problem, increasing the outrage among consumers, especially after the official announcements of an upcoming sale of coffee which has not actually materialized in the bodegas that distribute the standardized basic basket.
This is how it came to be that, in the second week of January, a shop assistant on Calle E between 23 and 21, in Havana’s El Vedado, chose to put up two large signs with the phrase: “There is no coffee,” tired of repeating it with her voice to every customer who comes in asking about the product, while she has no idea when it will be available.
“I put up the posters so that people would be warned,” the state employee said with annoyance, while recalling that the capital’s official press published, at the beginning of the year, an announcement saying that the distribution of coffee through the ration book corresponding to January was imminent.
Despite this scenario, the Agri-food Industry assured that “the industrial processing of coffee” has already concluded and “work is being done on the distribution of the remaining territories before the end of January” without specifying whether the product that has already been processed contains one hundred percent domestic raw material.
The Cuba-Café Company had warned in December of delays in the arrival of imports and in the deliveries from the businesses that process the beans, which harmed “the retail distribution of blended coffee for the family basket” in that month. [’Blended’ coffee refers to the fact that the beans are often mixed with other material, such as dried peas.]
And not only is there a delay in the distribution of coffee, milk for people on medical diets is still missing. As justified by the company, “its delivery has not been possible due to the lack of financing to insure it.”
Since last September, the Ministry of the Food Industry announced that due to the “delay in arrivals” of powdered milk, people who had been assigned a medical diet would not be included in the distribution.
The only alternative that affected people have, said the agency, is to depend on the “availability” of other products derived from soybeans that are sold freely, an option developed, they say, in consulttion with “specialists from the Ministry of Public Health.”
The cuts in delivery, the Government reported then, would continue in the month of October, after clarifying that children are the priority in the delivery of the precious food, but the truth is that people with medical diets have already gone almost half a year without milk.
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COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
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