It just happened. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Somehow Cuba was once a land of plenty, which in 1958 it had one of the highest GDPs in the Americas. But it has since fallen to such an abject level that it's ration books have shrunk to the level of a national joke. What happened in the interim? Most people are well aware of exactly what happened namely Communism but the Associated Press in a story about Cuban ration book shortages dares not speak that taboo C-word.
This absurdity happened on Sunday when AP reporter Danica Coto very noticeably to once mention you-know-what in "Cubans struggle to survive on pocket-size government ration books as products dwindle."
The closest that Coto comes to mentioning the C-word is when she quickly invokes "socialist" in passing while reviewing the collapse of the Cuban ration system due to the utterly unmentioned communism.
HAVANA (AP) — José Luis Amate López hasn’t had a customer in almost two weeks, not counting the scrawny brown kitten that slinks around the bodega where he works in central Havana.
The shelves once laden with goods during his childhood sat nearly empty in late April, with barely anything to offer the 5,000 clients who depend on the state-run store for subsidized food.
Government ration books that once provided for a healthy diet and kept families fully fed for a month are now shrinking.
As the economy collapses and prices soar, a growing number of Cubans find themselves unable to afford alternatives to state-run stores and struggle to subsist on meager salaries in a socialist country of nearly 10 million where basic goods increasingly are sold in U.S. dollars.
Yes, once upon a time when the new Communist regime was still grifting off the recently expropriated capitalist companies, there were many more goods available for ration books until they ran out of stolen goods to distribute.
Amate López recalled that his assigned bodega was so full decades ago “you could barely walk.”
It’s now an empty room with dusty old posters detailing the prices and amounts of nearly two dozen goods no longer available, including yogurt, pasta and bars of soap. Two industrial freezers once packed with meat and chicken serve only to keep Amate López’s water bottle cold. In April, the only items he had available to sell were rice, sugar and split chickpeas.
Coto is apparently too embarrassed to mention that sugar, once Cuba's major export, now has to be imported due to a certain governmental system ridiculously lacking in her article.
Cuban comedians have spoofed the ration book, creating a character named “Pánfilo” who sings a rhyming chorus in a recent video posted online: “Place the notebook in a cemetery, because it’s ready to be buried.”
Perhaps those Cuban comedians should add a stanza about the AP refusing to mention the reason why those ration books are ready to be buried.
