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Cuba in the Flesh: Food (In)Security and Growing Poverty

HAVANA TIMES – Cuban voices from the official camp, or those “supportive” of the government, promote an image of “social justice” and accessible well-being for everyone, in “equity,” while the multiple crises and the latest manifestations of social classes run rampant across this land.

In Cuba, it has long been common to hear the phrase “there is hunger/I’m hungry.” Obviously, this is not like the Nazi concentration camps, besieged Leningrad during World War II, or Spain’s General Weyler’s reconcentration camps in Cuba itself during the anti-colonial war of 1895–98. So then, what are we talking about?

Cuban government media frequently mentions the terms “food security” and “vulnerability,” both part of the lexicon of certain international agencies. The first increasingly appears in the context that “each municipality must provide its own food”; the second is used to describe “people in situations of vulnerability”: a broad spectrum within the citizenry, made up of those who are financially less advantaged within today’s predatory climate.

But what lies behind such words?

Food Security or Food Insecurity?

For Cuban economist Pedro Monreal (in Paris), rather than food security, we should be speaking of food insecurity — for which no official measurements are published — and the key question today is whether we are moving toward a “condition of severe food insecurity,” considering the situation in each household.

It turns out there are simple ways to find out.

In a recent Facebook post, Monreal cited an article by ECLAC (the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) that included a very simple survey to measure the food insecurity suffered by a person or family. The answers are simple: yes or no.

I felt the impulse to take the survey myself, just to have a point of reference. But first, let’s consider who I am: a precarious worker, without stable employment, living in a peripheral town near Havana.

Filling Out the Survey

1. Have you worried about........

© Havana Times