Every year garlic-sellers on the streets of Havana peddle bulbs from backpacks, as if selling fake luxury handbags or electronics
. The price of garlic tends to boom around November and December, before more comes onto the market. A pensioner in one part of the capital complains that a bulb now costs 25 pesos and 450g costs 240 pesos, four times the price in September., or garlic resellers. They pay garlic farmers $50,000-100,000 to buy their whole harvest and then resell it to a network of other resellers, who in turn sell to smaller resellers and so on.
Profiting from garlic is nothing new. In 1986 Fidel Castro, then Cuba’s dictator, discovered that a garlic farmer was making $50,000 a year—ten times a local surgeon’s wage at the time—by privately selling what he had left over after meeting his quota for the state agriculture system. Outraged to see that people were behaving like “capitalists in disguise”, he closed the private farmers’ markets where it was sold.
But the pandemic has exacerbated shortages of basic goods in Cuba, along with fertilisers, fungicide, seeds and supplies for animals. Thousands of rabbits died last summer in an outbreak of haemorrhagic disease. Pigs may be next; the country is on high alert following an outbreak of African swine fever in the Dominican Republic. Last year the government mooted eating guinea pigs, a popular food in parts of South America, but the idea was largely ridiculed.
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