Economist: Parrot diplomacy

Having rescued Cuba with cheap oil, Venezuela is to be paid back in zebras


SOON after Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba in 1959, goes an old Cuban joke, the signs at the Havana zoo that read “Please do not feed the animals” were changed to “Please do not take the animals’ food”. When the Soviet Union crumbled and withdrew its aid to Cuba, triggering the so-called “special period” that began in the early 1990s, times became even harder and the joke changed. The new signs, so the story went, begged visitors not to eat the animals.

For those who lived through it, the special period was anything but funny. Domestic cats disappeared from the streets and reappeared on the dinner table. The zoo population thinned out. “The peacocks, the buffalo and even the rhea [a South American bird that resembles an ostrich] disappeared,” says a Havana resident. “The hyaenas became vegetarians, the zoo was depopulated and even the tigers had only sweet potatoes and a bit of cassava to eat.”

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