A purchase of just one onion and twelve chili peppers costs 1,000 pesos in a market in Nuevo Vedado
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Havana, September 30, 2026 / There are purchases that it is better not to take out of the bag right away. Leaving them in it for a few minutes, as if to delay the moment of placing them on the table postpones the discomfort of doing the accounts. This Tuesday I returned from the Tulipán Street market in Nuevo Vedado, with an onion, and a dozen cachuca peppers. I stood looking at that little haul’ some green peppers, two already red, others starting to get their color and the golden onion to one side.
One thousand pesos.
I counted them again, not the pesos, but the chili peppers. Twelve. There was still only one onion. Nothing else justified the expense, no hidden tomatoes, no bunch of scallions, not even a couple of lemons adding zeros to the number. One onion and twelve chili peppers for 1,000 pesos in a country where the monthly minimum wage is 3,210.
Going to the market has long since become a series of renunciations for Cubans. One arrives thinking about what you need and end up buying what you can. In front of the stall, a silent negotiation begins: this yes, that no; the tomatoes can wait; better I buy fewer eggs; the fruit will have to wait for another day. The shopping list shrinks as the uncertainty of how much those same products will cost tomorrow expands.
Even memorizing prices is useless. That familiar domestic memory that for years allowed us to know when something was expensive and when it was worth taking advantage of a sale has now become worthless. A price we heard three days ago might seem cheap today. For example, I try to remember how much malanga cost last week, but I can’t. Everything goes up too fast.
With the dollar at 750 pesos on the informal market, we no longer measure the cost of living solely by what we manage to bring home, but by everything we have to leave behind in the market. Each bag weighs less in our hands and much more in our pockets.
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