economy, Alejandro Gil Fernández, admitted having evidence that several state stores, marketers  of food products and other necessities, they sold in dollars without authorization. At the meeting of the Council of Ministers, this practice was condemned, as well as the inflated circulation of currency on the black market, among other exchanges on the illegal market.  

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Unlike the black market, the gray market calls what the Cuban government condemns as "diversion of goods", that is, the purchase and sale of merchandise outside the channels authorized by the supplier, these merchandise being legal. On the island, from small private businesses dedicated to gastronomy to the administration of cooperatives and other state entities are subject to this type of exchange. More than with “enrichment” and “corruption”, these practices seem to be related to “struggle”, subsistence and resistance against insufficient salaries and fiscal obstacles.

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When it comes to getting a job, a common question is, and what is resolved there? For many state workers, the assets and access of their companies are a way to supplement their insufficient wages. The social perception of this practice implies two things. First, with a gray market as scarce as Cuba's, access to food products often includes food of poor quality, poor quality, even past its expiration date. In the networks you can find these days homemade recipes for reuse of expired powdered milk that users have purchased in some establishments.  Others wonder what the real ingredients are in a tomato sauce or a guava bar bought in state-run farmers' markets, and which are more like carrot soup or beet quince.  

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Second, the discontent of the population is used by the official discourse to redirect social demands to the closest piece in the distribution chain, to the weakest link: the “reseller”, the “hoarder”, the “dealer”. As the crisis progresses, the official press exposes caricatures that ridicule or demonize agricultural producers and vendors, as the only culprits of the inflation in the prices of vegetables and meat.