Production targets met, comrades

Good news for egg lovers in the Eastern province of Holguin, in Cuba.

The local Communist Party paper, Ahora, has just reported that the agricultural sector in the province has experienced the best production figures in a decade, despite the drought.

Now, you know as well as I do that production figures in today's Cuba are at best rubbery and at worst, well, useless. It's an old trick Castro learnt from the Soviet Union, where vast armies of State "statisticians" used to be deployed daily by the Kremlin to collate ever more ridiculous production figures from across the Empire to prove the historic superiority of Communism.

But, we are a genereous lot, so, let's take the figures in Ahora at face value.

The paper says 182 million eggs are expected to be produced this year in the province, compared to 136 million eggs in 2005. And in 2007, some 205 million eggs will be produced – which will bring egg production in Holguin to what it was in 1989.

“Thanks to this result,” says the paper, “the delivery of 10 eggs per person was completed.”

That’s right: 10 eggs per person. Read it here.