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The National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) of Cuba revealed that in 2025, only three provinces in the country surpassed the threshold of 7,000 Cuban pesos in average monthly salary: Havana, Artemisa, and Villa Clara, according to the report “Average Salary in Figures. Cuba, 2025,” published in April 2026.
The national average monthly salary was 6,930 pesos, which represents an increase of 1,091 pesos compared to the 5,839 pesos recorded in 2024.
Havana tops the provincial ranking with 7,911 pesos, followed by Artemisa with 7,318 and Villa Clara with 7,028, making these the only three exceeding 7,000 pesos nationwide.
At the opposite end, the Special Municipality Isla de la Juventud recorded the lowest salary in the country at 5,582 pesos, followed by Guantánamo (5,783), Santiago de Cuba (5,872), and Granma (5,926), all below 6,000 pesos per month.
The gap between the province with the highest salary and the one with the lowest reaches 2,329 pesos, a difference of 41.7% that reflects the deep regional inequality characterizing the Cuban economy.
The eastern provinces—historically the poorest—are consistently below the national average, while Havana accounts for 32.5% of the country's wage fund, with over 678,000 registered workers in the state sector.
Despite the nominal increase, the real increase in purchasing power was minimal: the official inflation rate in Cuba during 2025 was 14.1%, resulting in a real growth of only 4%.
At the informal exchange rate, the average salary of 6,930 pesos is roughly equivalent to 15 dollars a month, a figure that economist Elías Amor bluntly described: “What can you buy with 15 dollars? If the salary is the price of labor, the fundamental problem in Cuba is that such a wage is worthless.”
The data from the ONEI contrasts with the estimates from independent economists regarding the actual cost of living on the island.
The economist Javier Pérez Capdevila calculated that surviving in Cuba costs at least 50,000 pesos monthly per person, while the Food Monitor Program estimated that two adults in Havana need 41,735 pesos just for basic food needs.
This means that even the highest salary in the country—7,911 pesos in Havana—represents less than one-fifth of what is needed to survive, according to those independent estimates.
The salaries in Cuba against impossible prices are a constant that the regime has not been able to reverse despite sustained nominal increases since the monetary reform of 2021.
The highest-paying sectors nationwide in 2025 were construction (15,320 pesos), electricity, gas, and water supply (13,073 pesos), and business services (9,976 pesos), activities primarily concentrated in the western region of the country.
The landscape of wage injustices in Cuba worsens when one considers that the current minimum wage is only 2,100 pesos, equivalent to about five dollars at the official exchange rate, and that half of working-age Cubans neither work nor seek employment, according to data from the regime itself.
According to the Food Monitor Program, a Cuban needs at least three average salaries to cover the basic basket, a reality that turns the nominal increase of 2025 into a statistical figure with no real impact on the daily lives of the population.
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