An elderly woman from Havana was captured on video while searching for sweet potatoes discarded on the street to feed herself and a companion who is bedridden. The footage was recorded and shared on Facebook by the activist and former political prisoner Silverio Portal, who accompanies her during the search and collects her heart-wrenching testimony.
The woman explains that sweet potato —historically the cheapest staple food in Cuba— costs 130 pesos per pound in the informal market, a price that is well beyond what she can afford.
The most harrowing account comes when the elderly woman describes what happened before she went out to look for food on the street. "We had nothing to eat. The truth is, yes, honestly, nothing to eat," she states. Faced with that situation, she had to send her son to the father’s aunt’s house so he could eat.
A woman I know deboned some chickens and sent her the scraps. With that, she made the only thing on her table: "I took those bones, boiled them. I’m not ashamed to say it. I boiled them, added a little seasoning, and a handful of rice, and we had a broth."
When Portal asks him if he at least ate something that day, the response is unequivocal: "Today we're in the clear. In the clear."
This case is not isolated. In April, images captured in Havana showed people picking up onions among the trash of a landfill, and in May, a man named Basilio Plasencia confessed that he collects items to sell and eats discarded food because he is hungry. Earlier this month, the story of two elderly people who claimed to be suffering from hunger once again shook social media.
The numbers support what these videos show. According to a survey by the Food Monitor Program and Cuido60 presented in May, 33.9% of Cuban households had at least one member who went to bed hungry in the previous month. Among those over 60 years old, 55.6% reported losing all access to food. The minimum pension in Cuba is 4,000 pesos per month —equivalent to between seven and ten dollars— while a pound of sweet potato, which cost less than 10 pesos in 2020, is now priced between 80 and 130 pesos this year. The official inflation rate for food and non-alcoholic beverages was 42.66% year-on-year at the end of September, according to the National Office of Statistics and Information.
Portal, recognized as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International after being incarcerated by the Cuban regime on charges of "contempt," has been documenting these scenes in the capital for years. At the end of the video, his conclusion is clear: "There is tremendous hunger in Cuba."
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