Cuba’s Ration Booklet - A Catalogue of Privations

Cuba's Ration Booklet: A Catalogue of Privations
February 14, 2014
Ernesto Perez Chang

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 "bodega" neighborhood store where rationed items are purchased.
Photo: Juan Suarez
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.

Perhaps it is in order to justify its persistence in our lives that the
document, a true catalogue of privations, is furnished with other
control functions and has become an essential means of regulating and
determining the course of our existences. It is of such vital importance
in many low-income homes that, on the cover, they have gone as far as
printing a disclaimer to the effect that the ration booklet is not "an
official document." All of us, however, know that it is, and we take it
everywhere, next to our identification card. We even affix it to our
passport when we travel abroad. The devil is in the details.


Chicken for fish. Photo: Juan Suarez
The ration or "supplies" booklet (as it is officially referred to)
deserves a place among the nation's emblems – I don't think anything
represents our people and the history or privations it has endured more
eloquently.

Only in certain privileged homes does the ration booklet disappear or,
quite simply, is put to rest in a drawer or garbage bin. We are talking
about the mansions in restricted areas or the realm of the gods of this
island Olympus: the managers of large or small State companies,
high-ranking military officers, government officials with effective
powers, men and women who have known how to take advantage of the many
and perverse control mechanisms or those who have simply discovered
socialism is a big party where, if things aren't going well for you,
it's simply because you were not invited.

Source: Cuba's Ration Booklet: A Catalogue of Privations - Havana
Times.org - http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=101872