A Cuban identified as Anayad Sánchez shared a video on Facebook that starkly summarizes the food reality of the Island: a recipe for congrí made without beans, using guava tree bark as a substitute for the essential ingredient of one of the most iconic dishes in Cuban cuisine.
In the video, Anayad explains the technique step by step: boil the guava peel exactly as you would boil beans, strain it well, and then incorporate the sauté, salt, and sugar in the usual way.
"Believe me when I say it not only looks like arroz con congrí, it smells and tastes exactly the same," he assures.
The author emphasized that this is not her own invention. "No one told me this. I lived it myself. This was my reality," she stated, and clarified that she learned the technique from older individuals.
At the end of the video, he added a phrase that encapsulates two crises in a single sentence: "To the rice cooker, if the power lets you," a direct reference to the blackouts that also prevent cooking in Cuba.
The video, tagged with the hashtags #LivingInCuba and #RealLifeWithoutFilters, garnered over 147,000 views, reflecting the widespread identification of Cubans with that reality.
Congrí is an identity dish whose name comes from Haitian Creole: "congó" (beans) and "riz" (rice). Its preparation without the central ingredient is not merely a culinary anecdote, but a reflection of the collapse of the Cuban food system after decades of a centralized economic model.
The numbers support what the video shows. According to the Food Monitor Program, 96.91% of the Cuban population does not have adequate access to nutritious food, a figure recorded last April.
The survey "In Cuba There Is Hunger 2025" revealed that 33.9% of households had at least one member who went to bed hungry in the past 30 days, an increase of 9.3 percentage points compared to 2024.
The national production of beans plummeted by 70% between 2018 and 2023, according to official data, and the price of this grain in the informal market exceeds 350 Cuban pesos per pound in some provinces, while the average state salary barely reaches 7,000 pesos per month. Rice, the other component of congrí, exceeds 400 pesos per pound.
Anayad's recipe is not an isolated case.
In recent years, various emergency recipes have circulated on social media: ropa vieja made with banana peels, fried cassava peels, mashed root vegetables as a substitute for rice, or homemade bread in response to skyrocketing prices.
The Cuban people's ingenuity, far from being a celebrated virtue, is the forced response to decades of failure of the economic model that has devastated national agricultural production and left the country reliant on imports for between 70% and 80% of its food.
The to assist two million Cubans -one in five residents- in light of the magnitude of the food crisis on the island.
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