“No Bread, No Flour” An Omnipresent Sign in Havana Shops

Shortages affect both the rationed and informal markets.

By Natalia Lopez Moya (14ymedio)

HAVANA TIMES – In La Timba the mornings are too quiet. In that poor neighborhood that extends a few meters from the Plaza of the Revolution in Havana, the calls of the street vendors who sell bread have not been heard for days. The absence of their voices is a terrible sign in a city where many bakeries have displayed the “There is no” sign due to the lack of flour that has sunk the production of this basic food.

“There is some, but you have to do a lot to find it,” says a retiree who this Friday walked from the Luyano neighborhood to Central Havana. “I went to several private businesses, and they say they are not making bread, that they don’t know when they will sell it again.” In at least two of these shops, employees explained that the current shortage is due to problems with the supply of flour after the offensive that the authorities unleashed against informal sellers and illegalities in the capital and also in the provinces, especially Matanzas.

An open secret is that much of the bread sold by street vendors is made in the same bakeries that make the rationed bread rolls. The raw materials that guarantee 60 grams per consumer per day are being diverted and become a product that economically supports a wide network of bakers, administrators who turn a blind eye, and informal sellers. These days, the official media have warned in several provinces that the State does not have enough flour to guarantee that daily quota, a shortage that has also put the black market in check.

Private producers are also experiencing difficulties. “The price of flour has gone up, which forces us to raise prices or cut production,” Samuel, a young baker who works in a private candy store where they also make cookies, breads and the popular breadsticks, explains to this newspaper. “In February of last year, if you bought a 25-kilogram bag it wasn’t even 30 dollars, but now it’s a miracle if you can find it under $40.”

“We had to stop selling bags of bread because there was one complaint after another. We had one that contained eight bread rolls at 200 pesos because they were big, but the people who came in treated us like scammers,” he explains. Finally, “we couldn’t even continue at that price, because buying quality flour and selling at that price only gives us losses.”

Samuel points to an increase in State controls as part of the problem. “Some inspectors arrived at the bakery and started handing out fines before even entering. They fined us thousands of pesos because we had a sign outside with the prices, and they said No, it has to be inside. Then they came in, and because there was a bag with a little flour that we had transferred from a sack and did not have the origin on the outside to compare it with the invoice, they added 8,000 more pesos to the fine.”

The result was that they stopped making not only bread but also pound cake, puff pastry and any other type of dough made from flour. “Now we are only making cremitas de leche (cream milk sweets), guava bars, custard and coconut macaroons.” Of course, the large sign with “There is no bread, there is no flour” has been placed inside the business, on a counter with empty shelves behind it.

Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba.

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