Guantanamo.- If there is one food that Cubans love, it is the potato. Its harvest, distribution and use in the kitchen is a point of attention and controversy. During these weeks, it is normal to see straight trucks loaded with the tuber, queues until late at night to buy them and, of course, fried potatoes in many frying pans in our homes.
Despite the efforts of farmers and transporters to ensure that at least one «potato round» reaches every consumer, there are still some places where the traces of the coveted food are perhaps dreams to be fulfilled. So many good intentions still have seams and shadows that are far from happy.
The variety of prices is a rainbow that does not have a very clear explanation. The one in the small squares or markets and rationed per person costs 11 CUP per pound; but we have also seen it in direct trucks and even in workplaces at 80 and 90 CUP for the same weight. Of course, at 150 and up to 350 CUP the same amount in the resellers that few denounce with the well-known phrase «they are struggling, let the one who can buy it buy it».
There are also repeated complaints about the scales and the prohibition even for customers to use their own electronic weights. The lack of a wholesale market for private forms opens the way for sacks and bags to be mounted on carts or electric bicycles before the eyes of consumers. Their destination? Paladares, cafeterias and private food processing centers.
Although many may think that I am exaggerating, the potato is almost a matter of national security, and any roll or deviation from its final destination, which is the people, raises eyebrows. I remember the documentary Desafío by Roberto Chile, in which Amparo Pérez said an eloquent phrase in 1992: «Even with a hot potato and a hot sweet potato, I am with Fidel! And she repeated it in 2004.
To the wise…let the potato follow and especially hot. (Trabajadores Newspaper)
