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Cuba slashes size of daily bread ration as ingredients run thin

STORY: Cuba’s communist-run government slashed the weight of its subsidized ration of daily bread by a quarter on Monday.:: Havana, CubaLast week, the country said it had run short of the wheat flour it needs to make the bread.The bread will be reduced from 80 grams to 60 grams, or just over two ounces. That’s about the same weight as an average cookie.The bread’s priced dropped slightly too, to just under 1 peso, or 1/3 of a cent.Many Cubans earn around $15 a month and can scarcely afford to shop for more expensive bread on the private market.“We must accept it, what can we do? There’s no alternative,” says this resident. The government blames the flour shortage on the U.S. trade embargo, a complex set of restrictions that complicates Cuba’s global financial transactions. The Caribbean island nation is suffering from extreme shortages of food, fuel and medicine that have primed a record-breaking exodus of Cubans to the U.S.The bread is one of a handful of basic food products that are still subsidized.Cuba's ration book or “libreta” was once considered a hallmark of Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.The idea was to provide a range of deeply discounted products to all Cubans… such as meat, milk and cleaning supplies.Today, the crisis-racked government offers just a fraction of those goods.They often arrive late or not at all, and are of poor quality. This Havana resident said the subsidized bread is “terrible” and that the “flour tastes like acid.”Cuba’s government has said it planned to reinforce inspections at state bakeries to make sure quality does not suffer.