Cuba's cascading crises mean milk shortages

In her kitchen nook, the mother filled a baby bottle with boiling water, sugar and three scoops from her dwindling supply of milk powder.“There’s enough milk for tonight,” Perdomo said, shaking the powder jar. “We give them whatever we find — grass, leaves from the banana trees,” Rojas said.He remembers the glory days, when Castro created massive state-run dairy farms, and a glass of milk was cheap. She’s entitled to a kilo of powdered milk, three times a month, for the equivalent of 12 cents per ration.“The milk still hasn’t arrived?” she asked.“They just called me,” the employee said. “It’s coming.” Yohana Perdomo holds her 1-year-old nephew, Omer, as her sister, Yanira Perdomo, left, and sister-in-law, Neyvi Suarez, sit nearby. There’s little for anyone else, though — including Yanira’s 7-year-old son.Sometimes Yanira’s mother-in-law helps out, buying milk powder on the black market. So her older sister chipped in, watering down Laurent’s milk so there was enough to share.[Fidel Castro is dead but Cubans want some of his policies to continue]Before the problems of the past two years — the pandemic, the food shortages, the spiraling inflation exacerbated by a government monetary reform — the sisters could enjoy an occasional dairy treat. Those delicacies had disappeared from their homes, appearing only on Facebook, where millions of Cubans had started selling things and engaging in once-unthinkable gripe-fests, and Yanira was now staring at a post.“Look,” she said.“Delicious ice cream, various flavors,” she read from her phone. But she couldn’t help wondering what had happened in a nation so rich in coffee, tobacco, sugar: “Where did this all go?”Government billboards around Havana left no doubt about what was to blame: the decades-old American trade embargo.“It’s United States, United States, United States,” Yohana said. But the island didn’t fully reopen to vacationers until last November, well after other Caribbean destinations.“We decided that, whatever it cost, you had to preserve the health of the Cuban people,” said María del Carmen Orellana, vice minister of tourism.Beyond the pandemic, though, a raft of U.S. sanctions does explain some of the economic pain. A senior U.S. official told journalists, however, that it’s “going to take time” to find a mechanism that doesn’t involve Fincimex.And the Biden administration left in place many of Trump’s penalties — including the designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, a move that has discouraged banks from financing the nation’s purchases abroad.Trump administration officials said their measures were intended to isolate the Communist government over its “oppression of the Cuban people.” Obama’s opening, they noted, hadn’t translated into any major improvement in Cuba’s dismal human rights record. While there are exemptions to the embargo for food — much of Cuba’s chicken comes from the United States — it’s not permitted to purchase on credit, as is common in global trade.Juan Triana, an economist at the University of Havana, said that the Cuban government’s economic policies were responsible in part for the long lines of people waiting for food and medicine. Adding to the confusion, the bodega manager told a reporter later that day that he indeed had milk — it just wasn’t Perdomo’s day to buy it.[The Cuban town Mr. Hershey built]Every now and then, some long-vanished food item suddenly reappears in Cuba. An employee of another store had knocked on doors in her neighborhood, bearing some remarkable news.A shipment of liquid milk — flavored with vanilla — had arrived from Spain.It was, Perdomo learned, some sort of Cuban government program.