For a couple to eat with dignity in Havana, more than six average salaries are needed.
14ymedio, Havana, 30 July 2025 — “The list doesn’t match the bill”—a stinging, resigned popular phrase—summarizes Cuba’s food tragedy better than any speech. And although the bureaucrats in power try to ignore it, any parent knows that the basic food basket (CBA) and the ration book are two concepts that barely touch each other today. A recent study by the Food Monitor Program makes it clear: for a couple to eat with dignity in Havana, more than six times the average salary is needed.
While the average national salary rose nominally from 4,648 pesos in 2023 to 6,506 in 2025—according to official figures—food prices soared much faster. Eggs, milk, chicken, or any basic product on the private market can devour an entire pension in a single fell swoop. Meanwhile, the ration book—that tired symbol of yesteryear—distributes less and less rice, bread, and sugar, and with unpredictable frequency. It’s no surprise that 96.6% of Cubans believe that subsidized products don’t meet their needs or tastes, and one in three rate them as “terrible.”
National agricultural production has fallen by 67% in recent years
Trying to calculate a CBA in Cuba is like playing dominoes with the pieces constantly changing value. Official consumption patterns are based on what is available, not what is needed. Bureaucratic statistics ignore the prices in informal markets, small businesses, and street vendors, who are currently the main source of supply. Added to this is a more striking fact: national agricultural production has fallen by 67% in recent years. As a result, fruits and vegetables have disappeared from most people’s menus.
The Food Monitor Program conducted a field study in Havana and Cienfuegos between the end of 2024 and the first half of 2025, monitoring prices, quality, and availability of 29 basic products distributed across eight groups. The analysis is based on a minimum monthly diet of 54,000 calories for women and 66,000 for men. It also adjusts for specific limitations, such as irregular access to water, electricity, and fuel. These factors increasingly determine what, how much, and how people cook.
In Havana, a minimum CBA for two people is around 41,735 pesos, equivalent to 6.41 average salaries.
The results show that, in Havana, a minimum CBA for two people is around 41,735 pesos—equivalent to 6.41 average salaries. In Cienfuegos, the figure drops slightly to 39,595 pesos, or 6.09 salaries. In other words, for two people to eat, they need the wallets of four other people. And that doesn’t include clothing, transportation, hygiene products, gas, or medicine. Just food. Hardly the bare minimum.
in parallel, cumulative inflation since 2021 has reached almost 191%, and real wages have plummeted by 35%. The subsidy model, sustained for decades as a social shield, has become unsustainable. The government itself has acknowledged that 80% of the ration book’s contents are imported, and maintaining its coverage is unviable. The solution? Shift the burden to the informal market, to remittances, to exiled families. What remains is a fragmented, unequal, and chaotic system: an “administrative capitalism” where everything must be paid for, and where nothing is enough.
Cumulative inflation since 2021 has already reached almost 191%.
In this context, the basic food basket ceases to be a technical instrument and becomes a mirror of failure. It reflects not only how much it costs to live, but also who can afford it. Eating decently in Cuba is increasingly a privilege.
The Food Monitor Program proposes thinking of the CBA not as a list of minimum products, but as an ethical threshold. A map of what should be possible. Because in Cuba, where food depends more on ingenuity than income, the basic food basket is not an economic calculation, but rather the x-ray of a fracture. And what it reveals is as clear as it is bitter: in today’s Cuba, dignity is rationed—like everything else—in impossible slices.
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