Cuban myths promoted by PAHO and FAO are debunked

Vista Alegre, Cuba. Ene.21.– “Don’t take away our products...", "They’re starving us..." "This is the government of Diaz-Canel!!!” … so shouted indignantly the neighbors and passerbyers when government and police forces tried to confiscate their loads of food, fruits and vegetables to a forklift truck in the district of Vista Alegre.

The impunity of the henchmen in the streets is over as the street vendors dump their products to the ground rather than have them expropriated.

This news on the one hand provides new evidence that Cubans are no longer impassive in the face of such abuses that affect everyone. On the other, Diaz-Canel, instead of taking steps to alleviate the food crisis, worsens it by responding with more repression and bureaucratic controls to a situation that calls for a profound restructuring of the economy and society.

Image showing the extreme poverty of shopkeepers and buyers in Castro's Cuba (2018)But it was not only the incident regarding the confiscated food to the neighbors of Vista Alegre. In Havana, with more than two million inhabitants, the inspections of vehicles that enter the city have increased to reduce the arrival of food products to the “informal” market, which is precisely what mostly feeds the residents of Havana.

The year 2019 has begun with such an acute shortage of food throughout the island that many Cubans are already foreseeing in the horizon another so-called “special period in times of peace”. They have returned to certain unprecedented culinary recipes of the 90s, an era in which some people even invented a “grapefruit steak”.

The production of eggs, pork, beef, chicken, milk and fish has collapsed ...

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