A video posted on TikTok shows the interior of what appears to be a salt crackers factory in Cuba: two workers are manually preparing dough on a metal table covered in flour, in a space with bare concrete block walls and no visible modern machinery.
The material, lasting just 28 seconds, was published on February 23 by the account @de.la.perla.para (Team Perla), with tags referring to Cienfuegos and the Cuban community in Miami. One of the workers is wearing a red uniform and handling a wooden roller; the other is working with her back turned, wearing a dark green jacket.
The images starkly depict the reality of the Cuban food industry, which is undergoing a deep structural crisis exacerbated by the chronic shortage of wheat flour.
During the first half of 2025, the Ministry of Food Industry (MINAL) received only 55% of the expected wheat, and 17 companies in the sector ended that period with losses.
The wheat mills have gone without deep maintenance for years, and due to the inability to obtain wheat flour, several state-owned companies have turned to substitutes such as cassava flour, moringa, or corn. Others have opted for the so-called "production polygons" with wood-fired stoves to produce cookies and other products.
In Cienfuegos, scarcity is palpable: in December 2025, the Business Group of Commerce of the province distributed only 1 kg of saltine crackers per household as an additional product to the regulated ration.
The situation is not exclusive to that province. The factory La Kary, in Artemisa, one of the country's main producers of cookies, has been idle for over a year due to a lack of flour. A senior official at the plant summed it up bluntly: “The flour that comes and will come into the country is called bread from the basic food basket”, making it clear that cookies are not a priority for imports.
The regime, for its part, has justified the high prices of the product by pointing out the "deficit of raw materials, primarily wheat flour, whose costs in the international market are rising disproportionately." In April 2023, packages of cookies were sold for 455 Cuban pesos on the Isle of Youth, generating controversy.
Some provinces have been seeking their own alternatives. The food company in Ciego de Ávila has been producing cookies with cassava flour since 2022, and in Cienfuegos, a plant in the Antonio Maceo Cooperative processes 560 kg of that same ingredient daily. Camagüey is also betting on cassava flour for sausages and croquettes.
The TikTok video is part of a growing trend among Cubans, both on and off the island, who document the real conditions of food production on social media, while the regime promises to stabilize flour without any improvement on the ground.
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