The Year of the Mango in Cuba
By Amado Viera
HAVANA TIMES – In the first week of June, the spring rains fired the starting gun for mango season in Cuba. Perhaps never before had the harvest begun at a more opportune moment—at least for the millions of Cubans who have seen their daily meals become a challenge they can’t always overcome.
I live in Camagüey, a city that has historically avoided the extreme shortages seen in eastern Cuba and did not adopt Havana’s tradition of having just one “heavy meal” a day, supplemented with snacks and dinner. “People from Camagüey like ‘food that fills the pot,’” a Communist Party secretary used to say, implicitly advising directives not to organize food fairs like those held in other provinces, which were marked by the sale of alcoholic beverages and light meals.
But “food that fills the pot” is increasingly hard to come by in Camagüey. If anyone had doubts, they were surely dispelled in recent days by the sight of countless children and adults voraciously consuming mangos, whether picked from backyard trees or gathered in the distant mango groves of Forestal (about 70 kilometers south of the city of Camagüey).
On the three or four days each week that the train from Santa Cruz del Sur runs, dozens of people gather at the Palomino Street station to load boxes of mangos onto horse-drawn carts and electric tricycles for sale around the city. In the past, that train also carried rice from Vertientes and fish from the large reservoirs in the southern part of the province and from the coastal municipality of Santa Cruz.
“People didn’t like this train because of the fish stench on the return trips to Camagüey, and because sacks of rice were piled under every seat and in any free space,” said Jose Luis, a horse-drawn coachman who regularly waits for passengers and cargo in Palomino. “Now, with the crackdown on sea fish and rice, we’re lucky if even the mangos make it.”
The government’s readiness to repress the informal market contrasts sharply with its indifference—or inability—to ensure the supply of basic rations.
In the last two years, Cubans have seen eggs, coffee, pasta, and meats removed from the ration system, while rice deliveries have been delayed by up to three months, and sugar rations reduced or canceled altogether. An extreme case is bread: its daily ration was cut by 25% in mid-September last year. “The reduction in bread weight should not affect product quality,” the Ministry of the Food Industry insisted at the time, in a statement that has aged particularly poorly. A few months later, bread quality ceased to be a concern altogether—it simply stopped being distributed in inland provinces.
No Money
“We have to admit that public opinion is very critical. Really critical and very negative.” That’s how President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged the situation in early April during the launch of a podcast on the topic of the basic food basket. Attempting to offer explanations—and above all, hope—he was accompanied by the ministers of Domestic and Foreign Trade.
The next hour can be summed up with a single headline: the country has no money to import rationed food, nor the resources needed to produce it domestically. The situation is so dire that neither the president nor his guests hesitated to invent the occasional piece of good news. This was the case with bread and rice. On bread, the Minister of Domestic Trade, Betsy Diaz, went so far as to claim that “in the coming days there will be significant improvement thanks to the arrival and paid freight of two ships carrying wheat flour, and three more vessels expected with wheat, which will revive production at our mills.” Her forecast for rice was no less optimistic: “Since March, products like rice have been pending in some provinces, but it is being shipped to the territories by sea.”
Her words likely sounded good only in Havana. According to reports from internet users in several provinces, up until March, rationed bread rolls were sold intermittently, but since April, distribution has stopped entirely in the interior of the country. As for rice, it wasn’t until mid-June that the March allocation was fully distributed, part of which had been owed to consumers in central and eastern Cuba.
Austerity as a Solution
At the beginning of 2025, the Ministry of Domestic Trade ordered that powdered milk would no longer be provided to children between six months and one year of age in livestock-producing provinces like Camagüey. Instead, they now receive one liter a day of so-called “fluid milk,” a pasteurized—and diluted—version of the original product. With this change, not only did the children lose out, but so did thousands of adults with doctor’s prescribed diets. The milk they had been receiving was redirected to replace imported powdered milk previously used for infants.
“But the most painful part is that, according to estimates, if the trend doesn’t reverse, next year no municipality in Camagüey will be able to supply the full liter [of milk]… and if the decline continues at its current pace, within three years, children in the province will receive milk only every three days,” the newspaper Granma reported last week. Nonpayment to producers, the negative effects of mandatory banking, the elimination of farm supply sales in national currency, the lack of transport, and the uncontrollable rise in rural crime are among the reasons many cattle ranchers have abandoned the activity, reduced their livestock, or diverted production to the informal market. Beyond repressive and control measures, the State has no means to motivate them.
Just ten years ago, Camagüey collected between 200,000 and 300,000 liters of milk per day. Peak production occurred during the rainy season—from May to November—when the province contributed up to a quarter of the national milk output. Today, it often doesn’t even reach 50,000 liters daily.
The dairy crisis reveals, more clearly than most other issues, the scale of Cuba’s food crisis. Traditionally, the island compensated for unmet domestic demand with powdered milk imports. But that option is no longer on the table, and the foreseeable future suggests that milk deliveries will simply start becoming more sporadic, perhaps even suspended for older children.
Like milk and bread, rationed rice and sugar were long undervalued, and their real importance only became clear when they stopped arriving regularly. The seven pounds of rice included in the monthly ration, for example, account for nearly two-thirds of average monthly consumption, while the two pounds of sugar made up a third of sugar intake. And the 80 grams of daily bread were, for millions of people, the only solid food they had to start their day.
In April 2023, the independent observatory Food Monitor Program warned of the existence of “hidden hunger in Cuba” and called for urgent action to protect the most vulnerable sectors. Two years later, hunger has become a visible and undeniable phenomenon, and the same organization now highlights the difficulty in accessing a balanced diet has spread across all sectors of society. Its latest survey found that in recent months, nearly 97% of Cubans had either reduced their intake of certain foods or replaced them with others due to a loss in purchasing power. The issue has even affected wealthier segments of the population, such as business owners, employees of foreign firms, and relatives of emigrants, according to Food Monitor, which not only measured malnutrition levels but also tracked access to specific diets and the availability of basic food staples.
Meanwhile, the government, focused on its campaign to reduce the fiscal deficit, has neglected social protection systems that would be especially useful during the current crisis. One example is the Family Attention System (SAF), a network of dining halls for the elderly, people with disabilities, and low-income individuals, which gained grim notoriety at the beginning of the 2021 economic restructuring program (Tarea Ordenamiento) due to steep price hikes that forced people to stop using it.
Following public outcry, authorities were temporarily forced to roll back some changes. But eventually, they took the same approach they would later use to “resolve” the rationed bread crisis: removing the state’s responsibility entirely. Starting in 2022, the SAF began depending on restaurants, food preparation centers, and other commercial or food service units, which are now supposed to provide most of the meals they serve—within their means. The rest of the supply is the responsibility of local governments, which almost always lack the necessary funds.
This practice has had two main consequences: the worsening of meal quality and the reduction in available food kitchens. Between January 2021 and October 2023, the number of SAF beneficiaries fell by nearly 25%, from 76,176 to “over 59,000,” according to a meeting presided over by Prime Minister Manuel Marrero. Since then, no new official statistics have been released, but testimony from a social worker interviewed in Camagüey suggests that the number of SAF enrollees has stagnated—or even decreased—because spots left vacant due to deaths or other causes have not been reassigned. “In my district we have dozens of pending applications, but neither [the Ministries of] Commerce and Labor nor the municipal government provide answers. Over a year ago they said the system would be reviewed and that subsidies for vulnerable people would be delivered through the ration book. But nothing has been implemented so far,” she explained.
Moreover, even at its peak, the SAF dining program was never a large-scale solution. According to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, more than 800,000 Cubans (8% of the total population) receive the minimum pension of 1,528 pesos per month (US $4.00). Many of them live alone or cannot rely on help from family members. Considering current inflation, they should be regarded as “vulnerable” and therefore eligible for SAF or another social protection mechanism, something that, in practice, does not happen.
These are only the most extreme cases of a much broader, bleak reality. Cuba ended 2024 with an average monthly salary of 5,839 pesos (US $15), less than half the amount needed to cover the cost of a balanced diet for one person for a month. Under these conditions, the vast majority of the country could be considered “vulnerable.”