Life is a banquet, even when the menu includes ostriches and potato peels, because what truly nourishes our existence is the ability to find humor in every absurd suggestion.

By Francisco Acevedo

HAVANA TIMES – Very few insults remain to be hurled at Cubans, but this week one more was added when someone suggested that one way out of the current food crisis is to eat less rice.

After the president himself declared that lemonade is the basis of everything; after a general proposed raising ostrich to feed the country; after a minister said peas haven’t arrived because lakes in Canada froze; and after an intellectual recommended eating potato peels—very little is left to the realm of the unbelievable. But Cuban inventiveness is inexhaustible, and we are living through a new level of surrealism.

The latest “enlightened” figure was scientist Roberto Caballero, who in a recent episode of the television program Cuadrando la Caja said—without thinking twice and without holding anything back—that Cubans consume “too much” rice and potatoes, foods that are neither native nor suited to the Island’s agricultural conditions.

Far from focusing on the structural causes of the food crisis, the specialist and the program in general diverted the debate toward the population’s consumption habits, proposing that these products be reduced in the national diet without offering real alternatives for stable and affordable access to........

© Havana Times