The onion grown in Cuban fields has become smaller and dirtier over the decades.
14ymedio, Natalia Lopez Moya, Havana, 5 August 2024 — Mojo criollo may lack the precious acidic flavor of lemon or sour orange, or even lack oil – which is replaced by water in times of crisis – but it must contain onion and garlic. Without those two ingredients, the mixture does not even deserve to bear the name of the traditional marinade so often used in Cuban kitchens.
Dignified, the onion is practically a must in every dish in the recipe book of this island. There is no stew, casserole, roast meat or fricassee that does not contain this vegetable that brings tears to the eyes of even the most ruthless. Lately, however, the tears have been focused on the pockets due to the prices that the product reaches and the long periods during which it disappears from the market shelves.
Despite its essential status, the onion grown in Cuban fields has become smaller and dirtier over the decades. The shrinkage in size has, however, been inversely proportional to the price paid for a string or a bunch, whether of the white or purple variety.
The product has been shifted to the furtive or illegal trade in an attempt to avoid price controls
A year ago, a pound of onions cost about 350 pesos at the market on 19 and B in El Vedado, Havana. One of the most emblematic and expensive stores selling agricultural products in the Cuban capital has been able to offer onions practically every week, but other businesses have not had the same luck. The product has been shifted to the furtive or illegal trade in an attempt to avoid the price controls imposed by the authorities
This August, in the same market, a pound of onions costs 400 pesos, but the size and quality have dropped considerably. In July, it had risen to 450 and “they were pitiful little onions, they seemed to have been picked from the field too early and had very little flavor. Where before two were used, four had to be put in so that the food would taste like anything,” lamented a customer this Friday.
However, the dramatic nature of the rise in price is seen more clearly when comparing the costs over the last four years. The 80 pesos per pound that the vegetable cost in August 2020 had tripled in 2022 and, this summer, its price from four years ago has multiplied by five, while wages have stagnated.
“Onion, onion! White and purple!” two young men shouted on Saturday inside a 12-story building in Nuevo Vedado. They were unlicensed vendors and at the price of each string, with a little more than 50 medium-sized onions, they could not offer them in the markets or on the carts in full view of inspectors. “It’s 1,500 pesos per string,” one of them responded when a neighbor asked about the price. The woman’s grimace made it clear that she could not pay that amount.
At the nearby Youth Labor Army Market on Tulipán Street, onions have not landed on the pallets for many months. Instead, their poor cousin, chives, are barely visible, “dirty, with lots of wilted leaves and sometimes half of them are rotten when they are cleaned,” says a man selling plastic bags outside the shop.
While the white onion is mainly used raw and sliced on salads, although it is also added to yuca sauce and other foods, the red onion is preferred, due to its stronger flavor, for adding to meats, beans and other long-cooked dishes. But they can also be used interchangeably if there is no other option. Choosing between several types of the same product is not an exercise that Cubans have been able to do frequently in recent decades, unless they have foreign currency.
In the Cuban informal market and in some digital portals large, clean onions are sold in hard currency
In the informal Cuban market and on some digital portals, large, clean onions are sold in hard currency. Packaged and without soil attached, white onions cost about $6 a pound and purple ones cost more than $6.50. If you opt for the granulated ingredient, a package of about 140 grams costs around $8. To all this you have to add the cost of home delivery which, depending on the volume of the order, can exceed $5 to the most central neighborhoods of Havana.
Producers like Leopoldo, a resident of Güira de Melena, Artemisa province, blame the reduction in size and quality of the bulbs on the lack of nutrients in the soil, and to the fact that the farmers do not have good seeds to plant. “Where before a string of onions would last us almost a month, now we have one in the kitchen for just a week. Luckily I don’t have to buy them because I have my own crops.”
When they are harvesting, Leopoldo’s entire family is dedicated to collecting them from the furrows and braiding the strings and bunches that they will later sell partly to the state-owned Acopio and partly to private intermediaries. “It is a nice job because you put them together with the dried leaves and everything takes on that smell,” he says. But where there used to be plump onions, now there are small ones. “That’s how everything is here, puny,” he says.
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