The Cuban influencer Nai, from the channel Facebook "Mundo Explora by Nai", posted a video in which she conducts a social experiment alongside a retired friend in Cuba to determine how far 3,000 Cuban pesos—the amount of her monthly pension—goes when trying to purchase basic goods.
The result is devastating: that amount of money is not even enough to cover a minimal grocery purchase for a month.
Nai visits several stores and breaks down the prices on camera: a bottle of oil costs 1,350 pesos, two packages of ground meat, each weighing one pound, total 620 pesos, and five pounds of rice come to 1,500 pesos.
But the most shocking figure is that of chicken: "A small packet of one kilogram of chicken breasts costs 4,600 pesos. At that point, a pensioner can no longer afford to treat themselves to it," the influencer notes, highlighting that this single product alone exceeds the total monthly pension.
Powdered milk is also out of reach: "2,700 pesos for a kilogram of milk is really sad. It's more than half of a pension," he laments.
The experiment makes it clear that Cuban retirees cannot cover basic needs with their monthly income, a reality that the regime has systematically ignored despite successive wage adjustments.
In September 2025, the government raised the minimum pension to 4,000 pesos, benefiting over 1,300,000 people. However, there are those, like Nai's friend, who receive 3,000 pesos, which is even below that adjusted minimum.
And even if the adjustment existed, the devaluation of the peso has rendered it irrelevant: in June, the unofficial dollar exchange rate is between 655 and 660 pesos according to elTOQUE, which means that 4,000 pesos are equivalent to less than seven dollars.
The economist Javier Pérez Capdevila estimated in May, after surveying 51 municipalities, that a person needs 96,060 pesos per month to cover basic needs, of which 70,070 are solely for food - a figure 24 times higher than the pension of Nai's friend.
This gap has direct consequences on the health of older adults: 79% of those over 70 years old have stopped having one of their three daily meals due to a lack of money, according to reports from May.
The average salary in Cuba in 2025 was 6,930 pesos, equivalent to about 12 dollars at the informal exchange rate, and lost more than 20% of its real value in one year.
Nai concludes the video with a reflection that directly addresses the regime's economic model: "When you go to a hotel and see an excessive amount of food, in the Cuban home there isn't much."
That contrast between the abundance of hotels for foreign tourists and the scarcity in Cuban households summarizes the dual economy that supports the dictatorship: one for those who bring in foreign currency, and another for Cubans who survive on pensions that don't even cover the cost of a kilogram of chicken.
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