By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Mar 20 2000 (IPS)

Small family restaurants in Cuba subsidised by the State provide nutritious, low-cost meals to low-income elderly with no family support, the disabled, unemployed single pregnant women and low-income single mothers.

Since the start of Cuba’s decade-long economic crisis, triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the east European socialist bloc, the government of Fidel Castro has come up with new solutions to address the growing needs of low-income sectors, which account for roughly one- quarter of the population.

“At the start of the crisis, there was nothing to buy. Now what I don’t have is money, because I’m retired and have no family, either here or in the United States,” complained Juan Tomás García, 77, while standing in line to buy the newspaper, one of his daily routines.

García said he had fallen into poverty over the past 10 years of recession, and pointed out that in the 1980s, he – a retired high school teacher – and his late wife could get by comfortably on their pensions.

“She died in 1990, and since we didn’t have kids, I’m alone in this life,” he added, while digging through his pockets for the price of the daily paper.

Since last year, García has been eating every day, even on holidays, at a restaurant near his house set up especially for people in situations like his.

“Maybe it’s not fantastic, but you can always get some vegetable stew, rice, a croquet or two and even dessert, and all of that for a peso or a little more, according to what you order,” he says.

García spends around 50 pesos a month at the restaurant, a little less than half of his 128-peso pension. Of the rest, 10 or 11 pesos pay his power, gas and water bills, and 20 to 30 pesos go towards “what they give me on the ‘libreta’.”

Through the system of the “libreta” or rations book, the State provides families with a number of basic articles at subsidised prices, such as sugar, rice, eggs, beans, chickpeas, coffee, bread, ground beef mixed with soy or chicken, cooking oil, and fresh produce according to the season.

The neighbourhood doctor, whose office is just six blocks from the small apartment where García has lived since childhood, recommended that the widower be registered at the small family restaurant, one of the roughly 1,500 operating countrywide under the Interior Commerce Ministry’s System of Attention to the Family.

“This way I can scrape by,” said García. Without the additional assistance, he could not afford to complete his diet with products sold at prices set by the laws of supply and demand at the free farmers markets operating since the mid-1990s, let alone goods sold at the chain of stores that accept only dollars (a dollar is worth 20 pesos at government exchange bureaux).

The new system of family restaurants, the first of which were set up in late 1997, is aimed at “protecting low-income people and ensuring that their daily dietary needs are met,” said Beatriz Cortijo, director of Gastronomy at the Interior Commerce Ministry.

The official said that the government’s policy is that “low- income families and people with physical disabilities in need of aid have State support to live decorously, and no one is abandoned to their fate.”

Last year, the Interior Commerce Ministry earmarked some two million dollars for the purchase of foodstuffs for the restaurants set up to serve the poor.

According to a specialised study, “the impact of the economic crisis on the population, although across the board, has been much harder on those families and sectors that were already suffering inferior material conditions.”

The National Institute of Economic Research calculated that in 1990, the first year of the crisis, 26 percent of the population and 22.5 percent of families classified as low-income (50 pesos a month).

At the peak of the economic crisis – in the first half of the 1990s – the nutritional levels of the Cuban population fell off sharply.

According to officially recognised statistics, average daily intake crashed from 2,845 kilocalories and 76.5 grams of protein per person in 1989 to 1,863 kilocalories and 46 grams of protein in 1994.

And although the average rose to 2,269 kilocalories and 56.3 grams of protein per person in 1999, the level remains below the minimum requirements of 2,363 to 2,400 kilocalories and 59.4 to 72 grams of protein a day, set by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

In the past few years, “nutritional levels have steadily improved, although they do not yet meet the minimum daily requirements, and there is a stratum of the population living on the edge of poverty,” said economist Armando Nova, at the University of Havana.

He pointed out, however, that the definition of poverty in Cuba “is not exactly equivalent to international standards, because the entire population has the same guaranteed access to medical care, education and social assistance.”

In the past 10 years, the State has spent 16.2 billion pesos on social security and assistance, for which 1.5 million people – of a total population of 11 million – are now eligible, 261,000 more than 10 years ago.

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