Inflation in Cuba: a malt beverage in Camagüey is sold for more than 10 times the hourly wage of a doctor

In the province of Camagüey, a beer is sold for 325 Cuban pesos per unit, a price that far exceeds the hourly wage of a Cuban doctor, whose base salary is around 29 pesos for every 60 minutes of work.

This is how shown this Saturday on his Facebook profile by independent journalist José Luis Tan Estrada, with the hashtag #TanteandoCuba, accompanied by photographs of handmade signs displaying price lists at sales stalls in the province of Agramonte.

"A malt drink: 325 pesos. A small box of juice: 200 pesos. Two products that cost cents in any country in the world. Here, they cost more than an hour of work for a Cuban doctor," denounced Tan Estrada in his post.

The reporter emphasized that "this is not an uncontrolled free market. This is not the wild capitalism that they criticize so much. This is the direct result of 60 years of a model that destroyed production, killed the food industry, and turned people into beggars in their own land."

The figure is not insignificant. A newly graduated doctor in Cuba earns a base salary of 5,060 pesos per month, which equates to just about 29 pesos per hour. This amount is well below the price of a simple malt beverage in the informal market of Camagüey.

That income is equivalent to about 10 dollars at the unofficial exchange rate, an amount that is insufficient to meet the basic needs of any Cuban household in the current context of rampant inflation.

The situation is not exclusive to doctors. The average monthly salary in Cuba reached 6,830 pesos, a number that also fails to keep pace with prices in the informal market, where basic consumer goods have skyrocketed to levels that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

The contrast is even more painful considering that Camagüey was historically the home of the Tínima brewery, now abandoned and in ruins, another of the many symbols of the industrial collapse that forces Cubans to pay exorbitant prices for products that were once produced locally.

Malta is not the only product that reflects the crisis. A bottle of oil sold in the state store per household costs 990 pesos, while in the informal market, the prices of basic foods continue to rise without restraint, leaving most Cubans without real purchasing power.