Potatoes, Food and Condoms - The Shortages Diversify

Potatoes, Food and Condoms: The Shortages Diversify

Posted on April 1, 2014



Chronic shortages in Cuba are extending their tentacles with renewed

vigor. The cycles of absence of numerous products are ever more

frequent, even in the markets that trade "in hard currency." Lately

toilet paper has disappeared (for the umpteenth time in recent months),

and similarly there have been short "gap" periods in which there have

been no toothbrushes, toothpaste, wheat flour, powdered milk, soaps and

detergents, sanitary napkins, etc. Nothing seems to be safe from the

black hole that is Castro's socialism, in which life is reduced to

"not-dying," while running a perennial pilgrimage after those articles

which, anywhere in the civilized world, are a part of the most common

reality.



With regards to food, it's better not to talk about it. It's enough to

see the Dantesque scenes offered to us by the lines that form at dawn

whenever someone announces that this or that farmers market "is going to

have potatoes." The police in Central Havana are practically on a war

footing attending to the brawls that occur in the crowds who aspire to

buy the longed-for tuber.



Now it turns out that the shortages have reached condoms, those

attachments needed for the safe practice of what some call "the national

sport." Things have reached such an extreme that it has come to the

point where drugstores and pharmacies have mobilized staff to change the

expiration dates that appear on this product–already expired–to "update"

it and be able to sell it. There is testimony that in some of Cuba's

interior provinces this task has been assigned to recruits doing their

military service: a strategy of total combat in the face of the alarms

set off by this small and humble latex object. According to the

authorities, this is being done "because the dates on the containers

were wrong."



Consumers, however, are wary. In a country where corruption and deceit

are part of the reality, no one feels safe. Some paranoiacs go to the

extreme of suspecting it's part of an official conspiracy to promote

births in Cuba… What it really does is lead to an increase in abortions.



At the moment, a friend tells me, half-amused half-worried, that if in

the 90s she had buy condoms to use as balloons at her son's birthday

party–today a young man of twenty-something– now she will have to buy

balloons to practice safe sex.



31 March 2014



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