In Cuba, Bread Lines But No Bread

It has been a while since we checked in on Fidel’s socialist paradise. You might think that an utterly failed and discredited regime would inevitably be overthrown, but that hasn’t happened, at least not yet. (See also Venezuela.) Meanwhile, when you think things can’t get worse, the decline continues. Babalublog reports: “After Milk and Beef, Bread Disappears from the Cuban Table.”

From the balcony, Yudineya watched dozens of bread and cookie sellers pass by every day in her neighborhood of Los Sitios in Havana, but for weeks they have practically disappeared. The shortage of wheat flour has hit private bakeries hard and has also put state bakeries in check.
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In Nuevo Vedado, a colorful private bakery that until recently offered bags of the so-called “ball bread” in addition to hard-crust French bread, baguettes and rolls, now offers only roasted peanuts and egg-white merengue. “We’re not offering bread because we don’t have any flour,” the employee explains. “Sales have fallen a lot, and if we continue like this we’ll have to close.”

It’s hard to get along without bread, especially when that’s all you have left. So Cubans stand in line.

In front of the bakery on Carlos III, one of the few that still sells “released” [unrationed] bread, the elderly, physically disabled, kids, mothers and all kinds of people begin to show up. Neither age nor the numerous ailments exempt the Cuban, who must defend his place in line as if he were in a besieged fortress.

An employee announces that they will soon sell a few breadsticks. …

Invoking strength that they don’t have, battered Cubans, hoping to get a breadstick, stampede to take their place in line. One woman complains, “All we can get is a little piece of breadstick per person.”

Once the “sticks” have been bought and packaged, the crowd recovers its place in the shade. They must keep waiting: in an hour, they think, the bakery will take out a small amount of garlic bread.

Bread line in Havana

Bread lines: the inevitable end point of socialism. And this is the path down which the Democratic Party wants to take us.

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