A carton of eggs for almost 4,000 Cuban pesos, a bottle of oil for 1,500, and a pound of sugar above 400. These are the prices that Martha María Montejo, a Cuban journalist residing in Texas, found in Bayamo during her visit to the island in early June, which she described in an interview with Tania Costa.
Montejo spent ten days in Bayamo visiting his family and returned with a devastating picture of the local markets. "A two-kilogram package of rice or less costs 900, 800 pesos," the journalist detailed.
The price list you observed directly doesn’t stop there. A pound of bone-in pork costs around 1,000 pesos, while lean meat—already cleaned and cut—reaches 1,800. Bananas exceed 200 pesos per pound, and a pound of lemons, roughly seven or eight lemons, costs 500 pesos.
"It’s completely extraordinary. I'm talking to you about basic things. I'm not talking about a candy, a boozy cake, or a cappuccino," Montejo emphasized.
The contrast with the actual income of the population is overwhelming. According to the journalist, a Cuban retiree earns between 2,000 and 3,000 pesos a month, which means that their entire monthly salary is not even enough to buy a carton of eggs. A specialist doctor, one of the best-paid profiles in the state sector, earns between 6,000 and 8,000 pesos. "So I don't know, I think there's no correspondence," summarized Montejo.
Faced with that gap, the journalist wonders aloud what those who survive on such pensions do. "And how do people live? The ones who get 2,000 or 3,000 and have to pay 4,000 for a carton of eggs, what do those people do?" Costa asked.
Montejo's response is unequivocal: "I am absolutely convinced that there are people who go to bed for several days in a row without a warm meal. Between not having the product and not having the means to cook it or prepare it later."
That last part of the problem has its own arithmetic. The almost total absence of electricity—Montejo claims to have had less than 20 hours of light in the ten days he was in Bayamo. This situation forces you to cook with coal, and that fuel isn't cheap either. A bag of coal in Bayamo costs between 1,400 and 1,500 pesos, a can costs between 400 and 500, and a coal stove exceeds 3,000 pesos.
“So, what are we talking about? We are talking about a truly alarming situation,” he concluded.
The situation in Bayamo is not an exception. Other recent testimonies from different parts of Cuba confirm similar or even higher prices, in a context where the official year-on-year inflation reached 15.89% in May 2026, although the actual prices in the informal market far exceed that figure.
According to a report cited by Infobae, the average salary in the healthcare sector in Cuba amounts to around 16 dollars per month on the informal exchange, a figure that illustrates the extent of the collapse in purchasing power.
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