The measure maintains the tariff exemption for those products but excludes powdered detergent.
14ymedio, Havana, June 21, 2026 – The Cuban Government has eliminated the maximum prices established for the retail sale of cut chicken, cooking oil, powdered milk, pasta, and sausages, after President Miguel Díaz-Canel himself acknowledged this week that the price caps failed to contain inflation and ultimately caused products to disappear from the market.
The decision appears in Resolution 150/2026 of the Ministry of Finance and Prices, published this Saturday in Extraordinary Official Gazette No. 73. The regulation took effect the same day and maintains the exemption from customs duties for the importation of those five groups of food products.
The resolution repeals provisions 225 and 310 of 2024, through which the government had approved both the customs benefit and the maximum retail prices. By nullifying both regulations, the nationwide limits imposed on merchants disappear.
Since July 2024, cut chicken could not be sold for more than 680 pesos per kilogram, while the maximum price for cooking oil was 990 pesos per liter. Powdered milk had a limit of 1,675 pesos per kilogram, pasta 835 pesos, and sausages 1,075 pesos.
“Price caps, in practice, failed to contain inflation”
However, the official caps had already been widely exceeded in practice. According to the price update published this Sunday by 14ymedio, a liter of oil sells in private small and medium-sized businesses (mipymes) for 1,600 pesos and reaches 1,850 pesos at the Correo de Pueblo Nuevo market fair in Holguín, and 1,900 pesos at the Delio Luna Echemendía fairgrounds in Sancti Spíritus, nearly double the former maximum.
A kilogram of powdered milk costs 3,200 pesos in the mipymes and reaches 3,700 pesos at the Holguín fair, more than double the limit established in 2024. A pound of chicken, meanwhile, sells for 550 pesos in that same market and for 650 pesos at the Sancti Spíritus fairgrounds. Converted to kilograms, those prices are approximately 1,213 and 1,433 pesos, respectively, far above the 680 pesos authorized until this Saturday.
The failure of the price-cap policy was acknowledged this week by Díaz-Canel during the closing session of the Extraordinary Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. “Price caps, in practice, failed to contain inflation,” the ruler admitted. According to his assessment, those measures “often caused products to disappear, encouraged diversion into illegality, led to higher prices, reduced tax revenues, and created an impossible race between real prices and administrative decisions that always arrived too late.”
Díaz-Canel also acknowledged that the limits remained “unchanged despite a changing economic reality” and that they hindered those trying to carry out economic activity legally. “Therefore, we are not going to continue imposing general price caps, as the prime minister explained,” he concluded.
Many economists had been calling for years for the end of price caps, which were incapable of containing inflation and were often responsible for emptying markets
The president added that the Government must correct “distortions in the tax system” that make production chains more expensive and ultimately get passed on to final prices. He also linked the abandonment of price caps to the announced transition from subsidizing products to subsidizing people, a long-standing promise of the government that has still not been broadly implemented.
The text of the Gazette stipulates that imports of cut chicken, edible oils—except olive oil—powdered milk, pasta, and sausages are exempt from customs duties, in accordance with the tariff subcategories included in the annex.
In the case of chicken, the exemption covers frozen chicken pieces and offal. For oils, the regulation lists soybean, palm, sunflower, safflower, and cottonseed oils. The list also includes different types of powdered milk and cream, pasta products, and various meat preparations.
One of the notable changes is the exclusion of powdered detergent. This product had been part of the package of six goods benefiting from the exemption in 2024, but it does not appear among the imports exempted by Resolution 150. The preamble itself specifies that the previous exemption remains in effect, “except for powdered detergent.”
Many economists had been calling for years for the end of price caps, which were incapable of containing inflation and were often responsible for emptying markets. But lifting them in the midst of the current crisis, without a recovery in supply, real wages, or the value of the peso, has fueled fears among many Cubans that prices could soar to levels that are difficult to imagine today.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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