Ismael, a 43-year-old man, lives with his partner and their pet in Havana.
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Frida Project
Do you have pets at home?
Yes
What kind of pets do you have? Since when do you live with them?
I have a dachshund, Sofia. He has lived with us for exactly 8 years.
What does your pet eat? How many times a day do you feed her?
Sofía has a varied diet and in principle she eats what I eat, she makes my same meals, three a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner, but in differentiated amounts.
Basically he feeds on chicken cartilage and dough, he eats elaborate food, he likes to feel that his food is cooked that day, I have tried serving him reheated food from the next day and he doesn't like it. We never adapted it to special food for animals because it is difficult to obtain and I knew that I could not sustain that diet.
With what I have, I always try to reduce fat and salt.
Who is in charge of getting him food?
I myself am the one who does the usual food shopping, and since it is my same diet, I always count on her as one more in the house.
How do you value the exercise of providing for your pet? Has it gotten better or worse in the last two years?
Undoubtedly today feeding a pet is difficult as a result of the same scarcity,before she ate two chicken thighs a day, today of course this is not the case, given the scarcity, she eats the leftovers we leave and mainly the bone cartilage which is very nutritious. Rice, stews, viands.
tomato, mayonnaise, snack paste. They make you believe that you have a choice, but you don't. In the end you sacrifice yourself to minimize yourself with what there is and not with and not with what you want, that's where half of my expenses go because you buy minced beef, some cans of pressed meat, all of that with prices that are extremely expensive, I say they are punishing prices. Finally, I do not receive work incentives because I am, as I told you, a self-employed worker.
The black market before COVID-19 was the main way to acquire everything, now it is avoided to the point of hunger and need because it is extremely expensive
Due to the shortage during COVID, there are some stores that were formerly establishments in CUC, which today have become in national currency (MN), there the State assigns you some essential products that could be used if they were not restricted, I'm talking about chicken, sausages and normado mincemeat. They give it in a very controlled way using the supply book and in insufficient quantities. Now you can visit those stores to purchase them once a month. They started weekly, they continued fortnightly and now it is once a month, the sacrifice to access the products due to the queues is sub-real, but with the purchases in those stores the majority subsists, in my case it is 15% of my expenses .
How many hours do you spend searching for and buying these foods?
The search and purchase of food is the main task of any Cuban, from those who have the least to those who have the most. In my case, I am always prepared to stand in line, because there is what there is, but it is not enough for everyone. Almost every day I do something related to the search for food, I am not always successful, when I go to the stores in national currency it is almost all day, just like those in freely convertible currency (MLC). In the agro-markets you invest less time, but you still spend a couple of hours in them.
Do you use social networks to find out about supplies and prices in your area, for example, via Facebook or Telegram or WhatsApp groups?
No, I do not use networks for this purpose.
If you had to divide your diet, how would you describe your intake of animal protein, vegetable protein, carbohydrates? For example, how many times a week do you eat fish, red meat, white meat, dairy products, eggs, vegetables?
Almost always chicken from regulated stores, you stretch it and it's like a rubber band, you eat it almost every day. I eat so little fish that I can almost say never. Red meat almost the same, last month I bought two tubes of ground beef, very good quality, in MLC, very expensive, two meals for three people per tube. That is the beef I have eaten in the last two or three months. I have access to eggs because 10 per person come to the cellar monthly. About milk, milk is not sold here, only medical diets, which have already been removed until further notice, and pregnant women and children under seven years of age have a milk allowance. I drink milk when I can buy it outside and it is very, very expensive. The vegetables, you find them in the particular agritos [small private agro-market stalls] and they are priceless. Onion, garlic and tomato are only available to big pockets. Perhaps what I buy the most is cucumber, avocado… there are no other types of vegetables.
Do you consider that your family has enough intake of healthy food for its normal development?
No, not at all, we are eating what we can, when we can, carbohydrates and sugar are what keep us going.
Do you consider that in your family there are diseases related to the lack of nutrients or an unhealthy diet?
We are a very strong race, even bread with rubble nourishes us, so if we are sick with a shortage of nutrients, which is almost total, we don't even notice it.
Do you consider that, when shopping, you must decide between one basic food or another? Do you think you are buying food at a fair price?
The problem is not that you decide between one and the other, the problem is that you buy the one that exists. I have never been in that dilemma because there is no variety. It depends on what is meant by justice, I would say that food is far above purchasing power, that could be said to be unfair
Have your food preferences changed in the last two years? How?
I love to eat, it's the greatest of pleasures from my point of view, a pork escalope, a kidney, roast pork and chicken in sauce with potatoes, tuna, a good steak, mixed salads, that I must not have forgotten to make… the ice cream, the malt soda, the sweets. But I am a man who has adapted since I was a child, I remember when I was on scholarship that I made a drink with water and some candies inside the container. Now I am not telling you not to drink an imported beer, a Kermato [non-alcoholic drink based on tomato juice, clams and spices], a carbonated soft drink, not to eat a delicious barbecue one day, but it is sacrificed [he pronounces it high and lengthening the syllables]. I love sugar water, which sucks, but it helps to stave off hunger sometimes. Sometimes I eat chicken mince, which I don't like, sometimes I eat a little more bread, which isn't bad for sustaining, which I don't like, but I have no other choice.
What commodities do you find only or most often through the black market?
Then I started raising chicks that they sold in groups of 20, in the end I couldn't keep them and we ended up with only two, we named them after Fidel and Raúl, so that when the time came, sadistically speaking, they wouldn't give us so sorry. Harsh reality, but black humor has always abounded on the island.
Then I started raising chicks that they sold in groups of 20, in the end I couldn't keep them and we ended up with only two, we named them after Fidel and Raúl.
I have a friend who, like me, raised chicks. During a winter of blackouts at night, she could not put the usual light bulb that had to be put in for them to survive the cold, as an alternative, she stuck them in a cardboard box in the kitchen or stove of the house with a low flame so that they received the heat of little by little, but at dawn the gas pressure rose and the flame came out with great force (it is very common for this to happen). When dawn dawned, he discovered that the entire box had caught fire and with it all the chicks that were inside. Many events like these occurred in each house, some sad, others less so.
Why were so many chicks delivered in the nineties?
Actually, what they sold us were male chicks (cocks), in hatcheries normally these little animals are separated and end up in a barrel or tank of water where they are drowned, (because there cannot be more than two roosters or only one in a coop, males are sacrificed).Someone from the Communist Party must have said “let's not drown them, sell them or hand them over to the people so they can try to raise them however they can”.For this there was no counseling campaign or anything in this regard, hence all those bloody or traumatic events in relation to chicks in the city.
Did you consider them pets at the time?
Yes, the love for animals has always been in my family, mainly my mother. Before, I did mark more distance between them, but today it is very difficult for me to separate myself from my Sofía.
What other experiences did you have about feeding animals in coexistence with humans during the accentuated supply in the nineties?
For example, with the subject of cats, I never had a personal experience, but I have heard and shared experiences with someone who did try them, they ate cats. The person I told you about lived in one of the Radio buildings that are next to the Hotel Cohiba, this person would go down very early in the morning and in the afternoon - night to fish for cats with a hook and rod. On the hook he put a small fish and threw it into the grass around the building, when he caught them he picked up the reel and put them in a bag where he later took their lives with a stick._cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b- 136bad5cf58d_
The stories are not really attractive to tell, very cruel, like a horror movie, and animal rights activists would suffer a lot when listening to them.
The final comment is that cats supposedly taste the same as rabbits.
There were many rumors that were the product of imagination and necessity, which linked stray animals, which other do you know from that time?
Well, what was heard, that human liver was sold, crazy things like that. But it is that we did not have to put too much to the imagination... with the subject of religious sacrifices there is also cloth to cut through. oh! And the vegetarian diet of the zoo. I saw lions eating grapefruit, and crocodiles eating curiels.
But right now, during the pandemic, I personally saw a giant tail made for a clean cow bone.For me it was laughable especially the number of people who were in line. Do you know what a clean bone is... without any meat, without any red protein around it, pure bone?
As the owner of a pet, what do you think is missing in the Cuban market for animal feed?
All.
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