In the Soviet Union, any significant goods had two price tags: one real and another virtual. One was the actual black-market price. The other was the "official" government price.
While many have been talking about Venezuela's food shortages, Cuba is now implementing a rationing program to combat its very own socialism-induced shortages of basic goods.
Socialism will always encounter two big problems when regimes attempt to implement it: 1) the impossibility of economic calculation without true market prices, and 2) the lack of an incentive to produce only what consumers actually want.
Socialist regimes have long gone to great lengths to replace all the independent institutions of civil society with the omnipotence of the state in all things.
