Juana Maria

Cubans have long been suffering from desperate food shortages, with people forced to wait for up to five hours a day to collect their rations of meat, poultry, eggs, rice, beans and other staples. The USA’s blockade has catalysed the nation’s most recent crisis, in which we met Juana Maria, who struggles daily to get by. Cuba’s communist government regularly runs out of money to pay for food, two-thirds of which is imported. Hence the inflated costs at which we had to buy the few ingredients that make up this warming - but humble - plantain soup.