Cuba’s communist-run government slashed by one-quarter the weight of its subsidized ration of daily bread, the latest shortage to strain a decades-old subsidies scheme created by the late Fidel Castro.

The bread, one of a handful of still subsidized basic food products in Cuba, will be reduced from 80 grams to 60 grams, or approximately the weight of an average cookie or a small bar of soap. Its price, too, was slightly reduced, to just under 1 peso, or 1/3 of a cent.

Cuba last week said it had run short of the wheat flour it needs to produce the bread, a predicament the government blames on the U.S. trade embargo, a complex web of restrictions that complicates Cuba’s global financial transactions.

Cuba’s ration book, or "libreta," as it is known among island residents, was once considered a hallmark of Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, providing a range of deeply-discounted products to all Cubans, including bread, fish, meat, milk, and cleaning and toiletry supplies.

Today, the crisis-racked government offers just a fraction of those products, and often, they arrive late, in poor quality or not at all. - Report from Reuters