Cuban Food Rations to End

By Miguel Saucedo, December 2009
World News Editor

AP Photo Food rations for 10 to 15 days in most Cuban homes.

The Cuban Food Ration booklet may soon be a thing of the past for over 11 million Cubans that depend on the “libreta” for their meager portion of subsidized food.
 

The booklet is the only checks and balances register the Cuban government has used since 1962 and was used to counterbalance the fall of the Soviet Union and the extensive U.S. enforced sanctions.
     

Trading food is illegal in Cuba, says Marlene Lopez, and a person could spend several years in prison for trading on the black market, especially red meat and certain sea foods, which are rare in the government food stores called “el Shopping.”

For 47 years, the ration “libreta” has been the means to a diet of rice, legumes, salt, potatoes, bread and eggs that most say is only good for 10 to 15 days.

Recently, Raul Castro, who took leadership from his brother Fidel Castro in 2008, publicly said that the ration booklets have undermined the progress of the country by providing all the necessities of the population, concluding that deep state subsidies don’t give people incentives to work. And even Fidel Castro has openly admitted that Cuba was creating conditions for the “libreta” to disappear, but did not elaborate.

President Castro spoke in August to the National Assembly saying, “The cradle-to-grave paternalism was over because the country had to live within its means"; meantime, the government began dismantling the food rationing system by closing thousands of workplace lunchrooms.

Joanne Morales, director of Refugee Programs of Catholic Charities in Phoenix, Ariz., says, “The decline and the outcome of the food rations in Cuba are a direct result of Murphy’s Law.”

“What do you expect from a communist run country,” says Morales. “They are the ones that imposed the food rations on its own citizens, and they simply have lost control of the entire system.”

Many Cuban government supporters believe that the U.S. sanctions and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, an ally since the Cuban Revolution in 1959 who supplied the island country with food and fuel, made this the catalyst for the food rations that has ultimately forced Cuba, one of the few countries in the world, to pay U.S. producers in cash for their food supply.

“The ration booklet was a necessity at one time, but it has become an impediment to the collective decisions the nation must make,” wrote Lazardo Barredo Medina, editor of the Communist Party’s Granma newspaper, on Friday, Oct. 2, 2009.

Medina ended by saying that the Cuban people should start preparing for a system without subsidies and start living without the notion that the food rations “libreta” is a birthright.