Dirty Eggs for Ordinary Cubans

Isbel Diaz Torres

HAVANA TIMES — The overwhelming majority of us Cubans, who are poor, know that poor quality products are what are provided to us. This even applies to chicken eggs – a major source of protein for the lower class in this country. Most of the time they come to us still spotted with droppings and feathers, in addition to being very small.

It’s not that Cuban hens are particularly unclean; it’s that the eggs always end up in the same place as where the birds excrete their feces, as is commonly known.

What adds to this, though, is that there seems to be a selection process whereby the tiniest and dirtiest of these eggs are sent to the market for purchase by the general population in national pesos (MN), while the largest and cleanest go to the market that deals in hard-currency convertible pesos (CUCs).

Recently, I made friends with a moderate-income Mexican woman who was visiting the island for the first time so that she could see the “revolutionary Cuba of Fidel,” though she was on a bare bones budget for her experience in “revolutionary” tourism. She told me that she was surprised to find that Cuban chicken eggs were so small.

She had bought a carton of eggs, each of which was very dirty, in an establishment in Centro Havana that sold its merchandise in national pesos. To make matters worse, when we got to the place she was renting, we discovered that they were full of worms, due to lack of refrigeration.

I explained to her that our chickens were no worse than those in the rest of the world, and that to appreciate this fact all she needed to do was go to a place that sold goods in CUCs, where the “upper classes” of this country go to shop. There she would find eggs that were as large, white and as clean as she wanted.

In any case, it’s worth remembering all of the genetic manipulation that’s performed on chickens and/or their food to artificially increase the body weight of these birds and the sizes of their parts.

Another friend, this time from Spain, commented to me that in his country eggs are classified by size and whether or not they’re organic, which of course determines their final price. Cleanliness is something that’s taken for granted there.

Here, we also have various prices (with those bought through our ration books being the lowest):
• Eggs bought through the ration book = 0.15 peso MN (each person can buy five of these a month at a highly subsidized price)
• Additional eggs bought through the ration book = 0.90 peso MN (where each person is also allowed to buy five per month)
• Eggs sold at unregulated markets = 1.50 peso MN
• Eggs sold at unregulated EJT markets* = 1.10 peso MN
• Eggs sold on the black market: 2.00 to 2.50 pesos MN
• Eggs sold in hard-currency markets = 0.15 CUC (equivalent to 3.60 pesos MN)

Nor can we forget the eggs received by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) and the Ministry of the Interior (MININT). In addition to these people’s relatively high salaries, their regularly received incentive payments, and their leisure and recreational perks, these members of the Cuban military receive an additional allocation of 10 eggs for 0.15 peso MN each, and they can buy eggs for sale on the unregulated market for .50 pesos MN each.

The funny thing is that none of the prices in MN are determined by quality of the product (though I’m not sure about the quality of those going to the military) or by supply/demand or by prices on the international market. Instead, their cost is determined by an outdated bureaucratic model that at some point in history attempted to subsidize basic staples (or basic individuals… such as members of the military).

I still remember my childhood, when a carton of 10 eggs cost 1 peso MN. Some kids would even buy them to throw at passersby from the roof of their buildings (a practice that was perhaps learned by small children and later used in the egg-throwing attacks on the traitorous “scum” that abandoned the country in the 1970s).

I should take this opportunity to explain that right now the play “Huevos” (Eggs) is being put on in the capital at the Adolfo Llaurado Theater in Vedado. It’s very well done; I even cried when a young man on stage returned to hug his grandmother, who he hadn’t been able to say goodbye to twenty years earlier, when he left the island under a hail of eggs and insults from his neighbors.

With all of this, in addition to the injuries of the soul, we poor are left with these dirty eggs each month, which reminds us of the place we occupy on the social scale today.

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* EJT: “Ejercito Juvenil del Trabajo” (English: Youth Labor Army), farmers markets supplied by companies that are run by the military and that sell produce for lower prices than other establishments. These are accessible to the general public but are located in relatively “upscale” residential areas.