A Cuban woman who posts on TikTok as @la.cubanita621 recorded a 37-second video last Monday in which she shows, indignantly, the conditions in which she tries to cook for her children: more than half an hour in front of the stove attempting to fry some plantains to accompany a plate of white rice.
"Look at what the revolution offers us... instead of improvement, we're going backward; right now, all we have left is to wear loincloths," says the woman while recording the scene.
The author explains that the daily menu consists of fried plantains with white rice because chicken is beyond her financial reach. "I’ve been here for over half an hour trying to fry some simple plantains so that my children can have them with white rice, because it cannot be said that we can eat chicken," she affirms, adding, "Can you imagine, who’s going to pay for that?"
The price of chicken in Cuba illustrates why that question does not have an easy answer: a 10-pound package costs between 4,500 and 5,300 Cuban pesos in provinces like Holguín, while the official average salary hovers around 6,930 pesos per month. A single purchase of animal protein would consume almost the entire monthly income of a family.
The woman also directly delivers an irony aimed at President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who has repeatedly urged Cubans to adapt to the crisis with "creativity" and "creative resistance." "As our President says, we need to be creative," she states with evident sarcasm, "and here we are, Homeland and Life, my people," concluding the video with the slogan of the Cuban opposition movement.
The clip is not an isolated case. According to the Food Monitor Program, more than nine million Cubans are cooking under precarious conditions due to the energy crisis, with power outages that can exceed 20 hours a day, forcing many families to resort to firewood, charcoal, or makeshift stoves. A Cuban woman was recorded cooking at three in the morning taking advantage of a window of electricity, and in May 2024, a case was documented of a mother who was cooking with firewood in the middle of the street in Holguín due to the combination of outages and lack of fuel.
In Villa Clara, the situation has escalated to the point where entire families and entire municipalities buy prepared food from state entities because they are unable to cook in their homes.
The food situation is equally serious. The Food Monitor Program estimates that 96.91% of the Cuban population does not have adequate access to food, and one in three households reported in 2025 that at least one member went to bed without dinner, an increase of 9.3 percentage points compared to the previous year.
The video from @la.cubanita621 includes the hashtags "Patria y Vida" and "cubalibre" and starts with a direct warning: "This is for all the idiots who say 'revolution' and 'I don’t know what.'"
While Díaz-Canel called for creativity and bravery at the International Fair in Havana on November 25, 2025, millions of Cubans have been standing in front of a stove for over half an hour trying to fry some plantains.
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