Private businesses have opted for imported citrus because the island’s lemons “are small and hard.”
14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, 12 April 2025 — When dancers in the last century moved their bodies to the catchy beat of Ignacio Piñeiro’s “Échale salsita!” (Add some salsa!), they imagined not only adding more fun to the moment, but also eating a butifarra (sausage) laced with mojo criollo (criollo sauce). But there’s no good marinade without lime in Cuba, so the musical theme now clashes with the reality of markets where the citrus fruit has reached 500 pesos a pound.
“The most affected are the bars that prepare many cocktails and drinks that include fresh lime,” Ismael, a 56-year-old bartender who has worked at several state-run establishments before finally working at a private paladar in the city center, tells 14ymedi . ” We continue to use freshly squeezed juice because that’s a guarantee of quality, and the customer can immediately tell when tasting the drink if it’s been substituted with an artificial concentrate.”
However, cocktail purists face a serious problem. “Supply is unstable, and prices can spike dramatically from one week to the next,” he explains. “We have a combination of suppliers: a couple of guajiros from Mayabeque, and the other part is supplemented with imported limes.” In his opinion, “the limes coming in right now come primarily from Mexico and are of quite high quality, with good yields.”
When asked to describe the ideal fruit for his concoctions, Ismael explains: “Large, with plenty of juice, few seeds, and an intense flavor.”
When asked to describe the ideal fruit for his concoctions, Ismael explains: “Large, with plenty of juice, few seeds, and an intense flavor.” But those qualities seem to have been lost in the citrus fruit that sprouts from Cuban fields. “They’re small, hard, hard to squeeze, and you have to use twice as much to make the drink flavorful.” This decline in national citrus fruits has come with pests, hurricanes, the loss of international markets, and government inefficiency.
Ismael is a close witness to the debacle. “I was in the Isla de la Juventud camps because I’m from Girona, so I can say I grew up among orange groves, planted with grapefruit and limes.” Those immense, fragrant fields were part of the National Citrus Program, created in 1967 by Fidel Castro, who, in the same way he did with livestock, coffee farming, and the sugar harvest, sought to turn the island into the largest regional producer of the fruits that nations with long winters craved.
In the 1980s, per capita citrus consumption was around 25 kilograms per year, and exports to the communist countries of Eastern Europe reached 200,000 tons. It’s hard to believe these figures now in a country where limes are rarely found in many markets, and many have opted to multiply them by zero in family kitchens due to their high prices. At the beginning of this century, according to the FAO, per capita consumption barely reached 15 kilograms per year, and it has continued to decline significantly, although official data have not been updated to the same extent.
“The other day I went to a private cafe, and they said they had all kinds of juices, so I asked for a grapefruit one,” Nuria, a 68-year-old Havana resident who also did “a lot of volunteer work for those citrus projects” that spread across the island in her youth, told this newspaper. “I asked the girl if they had a grapefruit one, and from her face, I thought she didn’t quite know what I was asking for,” she says. With a hint of irony, the woman explained to the clerk that it was a large fruit with a thick rind and a bitter taste. The clerk’s face gave no indication that she had found anything matching the description in her memory.
Nuria believes that many Cuban teenagers and children also believe that lime is a liquid squeezed from one of those containers containing such an unnatural extract, which are increasingly common in homes on the island. “If we were experts at peeling tangerines and squeezing local limes, what these children know how to do is take the cap off the bottle and pour a little bit into their food.”
In this setting, it’s easy to imagine the scene: the Ignacio Piñeiro septet singing “Échale salsita!” (Add some salsa!) and a beardless Cuban shaking a plastic container over a sausage fresh out of the package, because there’s not even any butifarra left.
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