Cuba has cut its citizens’ bread ration from 80 grams to 60 grams per day.
That is not news from 50 years ago. It is from today.
The cost of that bread is about one-third of a cent (about one peso). There are private markets in Cuba for bread sold at market rates. The problem is that the average Cuban makes only $15 (4,648 pesos) per month, so he can’t afford to pay even a dollar for bread.
Reuters reports:
Cuba’s ration book, or “libreta,” as it is known among island residents, was once considered a hallmark of Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, providing a range of deeply-discounted products to all Cubans, including bread, fish, meat, milk, and cleaning and toiletry supplies.
Today, the crisis-racked government offers just a fraction of those products, and often, they arrive late, in poor quality or not at all.
That is the predictable consequence of rationing. If producers can’t charge the market price for a good, they’ll provide quality that matches the level they are allowed to charge. One-third of a cent is going to be pretty low quality. But don’t worry: “Cuba’s government has said it planned to reinforce inspections at state bakeries to assure quality does not suffer.”
“The flour tastes like acid,” Bernardo Matas of Havana told Reuters.
In a media environment that often downplays the evils of communism, Reuters deserves credit for speaking to people such as Matas, straightforwardly attributing the decision to “Cuba’s communist-run government,” and including this sentence: “Beyond the few remaining centrally planned economies like Cuba’s and North Korea’s, rationing is typically only used during war-time, natural disasters or specific contingencies.”
That’s exactly correct. Cuba’s poverty is imposed on it by its Communist Party, which has had 65 uninterrupted years in power to figure things out. It hasn’t, because it can’t repeal the laws of economics.