HAVANA TIMES — Here is
the list of the “protein products” available to Havana residents with their ration
booklet for the week of January 27-31. It also includes a preview
of some food items that will be available in February.
Chicken: (one
pound for consumers over 14 and also for those persons under doctor’s orders).
Distribution concludes in the municipalites of La Lisa, Centro Habana and San
Miguel. Distribution in Habana del Este, Boyeros and Marianao.
Mortadela: (one
pound for children between 0 and 13 years). Distribution in Plaza, Playa and
Centro Habana.
Mortadela: A half
pound for all consumers. Distribution concludes in Marianao And Guanabacoa.
Distribution in Cerro, Diez de Octubre, San Miguel and Arroyo Naranjo.
Eggs: Five per
consumer and extra for those under doctor’s orders). Distribution ends in
Arroyo Naranjo, La Lisa, and Cerro. Distribution in Cotorro, Plaza, Regla,
Habana Vieja, Centro Habana and San Miguel.
In February the
neighborhood bodega stores will be supplying the following rationed products
for Havana residents:
Rice: 7 lbs / Beans: 10
ounces / Refined sugar: 3 pounds / Brown sugar 1 pound / oil: a half pound /
preserves: 13 portions / Coffee: 4 ounces for consumers over 7 years old.
Note: Coppelia
dairy products informs that the municipalities of Arroy Naranjo, Cotorro,
Guanabacoa, La Lisa, San Miguel del Padrón, Cerro and Regla will receive their
whole and skim milk allotments for medical prescriptions; the rest of the
municipalities will be concluding distribution of milk formula.
Havana’s Empresa
Provincial de Comercio
http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=101498
Cuba’s Ration Booklet: A Catalogue of Privations
Ernesto Perez Chang, February 14, 2014 Havana Times
The Cuban ration booklet. Photo: Rene Bastiaasen.
HAVANA TIMES — This is the basic consumer basket of the average
Cuban: five eggs and some pounds of rice (the kind that “gets sticky”, not
cooked) every month, enough sugar to turn a regular glass of water into an
emergency breakfast, one kilogram of table salt (with crystals the size of
Ping-Pong balls) once every who knows how many months. Placing these product
quantities on the same plane as monthly needs entails a complicated
mathematical operation.
Often, ration stores dish out a few grams of ground-up tendons and
fat mixed with soy flour, a bit of seasoning and chemical preservatives that no
laboratory could identify. People eat this concoction without knowing what it
is, exactly, but they have learned to swallow without asking too many
questions. The formula may well be one of the country’s best-kept secrets and
this business of eating blindly one of the most intelligent of consumer
strategies.
When the beans one buys aren’t eaten through by worms or weevils,
they smell of fumigation chemicals. Often, they are so old and stale that
there’s no way to turn them into something humans can eat.
The cooking oil, with flies floating on the surface, is good, not
for dressing, but for dirtying the bottle it comes in, and the only cheap bread
a working-class person can afford has such a sharp taste and weird texture it
sometimes ends up as pig fodder.
If the ship everyone gawks at from behind the seaside wall happens
to dock here, then people will get their one pound of chicken (meant to last
them for thirty days). Sometimes, one manages to bribe a doctor into
prescribing you a special diet and, after some difficult bureaucratic
procedures, can get their hands on a little bit more food for a few months.
Commonly, people develop complications as the years go by because of prolonged
malnutrition – and getting the extra bit of food is like winning the lottery,
such that the illness arrives as a blessing in disguise.
The food ration booklet doesn’t put much more on our tables. Every
year, the authorities take something out of them, such that the booklet never
thickens, it only gets thinner. That’s what the incessant re-editions amount
to. The product slots that manage to survive these regular trimmings end up as
empty as the inside of our fridges, to say nothing of our bellies. …"
