Condom Shortage!

Un Momento...

 Not too long ago, potatoes disappeared from Cuban markets. 

They are back, but police are struggling to keep lines of frustrated buyers in check because there are now shortages of beer and condoms, with some shops charging up to $1.30 for each prophylactic.

Havana blogger Miriam Celaya wrote that a woman friend had joked that if in the 1990s she had to buy condoms instead of hard-to-find balloons for her son’s birthday party, today she might have to buy him balloons so he can practice safe sex.

Cuban ruler Raúl Castro has repeatedly declared that the island is moving, slowly but steadily, away from its highly inefficient Soviet economic model and toward a more-productive system that mixes socialism with small doses of private enterprise.

Yet Cubans are complaining almost daily about shortages, sometimes in one province and not in another, sometimes in some stores and not others, and sometimes about one item and not another — for instance, no galvanized roofing sheets but lots of nails.

Havana author Polina Martínez Shvietsova wrote that the shortage of condoms in state-run pharmacies started about 15 days ago, although shops that cater mostly to foreigners still sell the prophylactics at $1.30 each — a day’s wage for the average Cuban.

“In the great majority of pharmacies in the [Havana] municipality of Playa, there’s a shortage,” she wrote. “In the municipality of Plaza, in the pharmacy at 23rd and 24th Streets, the salespeople said, ‘We have none, and we don’t know when they will arrive.’ . . .

“Nevertheless, all of the pharmacies that have no condoms do have signs recommending safe sex,” Martinez wrote in her report published in Cubanet, a Miami-based website for independent journalists.

The Communist Party’s newspaper in the province of Villa Clara, Vanguardia, tried to explain the reasons for the condom shortage in an April 3 report, and all but drowned in a sea of unanswered questions and typically complex acronyms for government agencies.

CECMED, a state agency that tests medicines and medical items, ruled in 2012 that the “Moment” condoms bought from China had the wrong expiration date and ordered that they be repackaged showing they are good until 2014, according to the newspaper.

But ENSUME, the state-run wholesaler that supplies EMCOMED, which in turn supplies condoms to state pharmacies, restaurants and camping grounds, simply has not been able to repackage them quickly enough, Vanguardia added.

ENSUME director Juan Carlos Gonzalez said his enterprise has more than one million condoms in its warehouses, the newspaper reported. But its workers can repackage only 1,440 strips of three per day, and the province alone requires about 5,000 per day.

Vanguardia writer Leslie Díaz Monserrat noted that condoms prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and HIV, and that their absence leads to unwanted pregnancies and abortions.

But Gonzalez offered no solution to the shortage.