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The Ministry of Finance and Prices of the Cuban regime formally removed the maximum retail price caps for five essential imported products through the , published in the Extraordinary Official Gazette this Saturday.
The affected products are chopped chicken, edible oils —except for olive oil—, powdered milk, pasta, and sausages.
The regulation, signed by Minister Vladimir Regueiro Ale, expressly repeals resolutions 225 and 310 of 2024, which had established those limits in July and September of that year.
The only measure retained from the original package is the exemption from Customs duties on imports of those five food items, while the maximum retail prices set in 2024 are rendered ineffective. The resolution justifies the change by deeming it necessary to maintain the tariff exemption, but to remove price caps and repeal the previous regulations to avoid legislative dispersion.
Resolution 150/2026 also redefines the tariff subheadings included in the exemption, aiming to maintain that benefit for the imports of chicken, powdered milk, edible oils (except for olive oil), sausages, and pasta.
The powdered detergent, which was also included in the scheme approved in 2024, ceases to benefit from the tariff exemption and is excluded from the new regulation.
The resolution came into effect on the same day it was published.
The measure is the legal embodiment of a shift in economic policy that the government announced just days earlier.
On June 18, during the closing of the Extraordinary Plenary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel publicly acknowledged the failure of the controls: "Price caps have not been able to contain inflation in practice. Many times they have led to the disappearance of products, shifts towards illegality, higher prices, lower tax collection, and an impossible race between real prices and administrative decisions that always came too late."
In that same intervention, Díaz-Canel acknowledged that price caps caused shortages and was emphatic: “That’s why we will not continue to impose general price caps, as the Prime Minister explained.”
The Extraordinary Plenary, held on June 17 and 18, approved a package of more than 20 economic reforms presented by Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz, with a total of 176 proposals.
These include the decentralization of the authority to set prices to companies and regional administrations, and the abandonment of the cost-based pricing method in favor of market references.
The National Assembly of People's Power ratified the reforms in an extraordinary session on June 18th.
The direct precedent is Resolution 225/2024, which set maximum prices for six basic products: chopped chicken at 680 Cuban pesos (CUP) per kilogram, oils at 990 CUP per liter, powdered milk at 1,675 CUP per kilogram, pasta at 835 CUP per kilogram, and sausages at 1,045 CUP per kilogram.
That regulation was suspended before it came into effect while the government negotiated with private importers, and when it was finally implemented, it generated exactly the effects that independent economists had warned about.
The Food Monitor Program alerted in July 2024 that price caps could increase scarcity and the black market, and economist Pedro Monreal noted that the controls forced the private sector to adopt a Soviet-style pricing method that would create repressed inflation and shortages.
In August 2024, the government itself confirmed the shortage of chicken in the market.
The macroeconomic context in which the measure arrives is critical.
In May 2026, the official year-on-year inflation rate reached 15.89%, with food and non-alcoholic beverages increasing by 19.24%, according to data from the National Office of Statistics and Information.
Díaz-Canel conditioned the liberalization of prices on a reform of the social protection system: "These decisions can only be implemented alongside a more direct and effective social protection, with a shift from subsidizing products to subsidizing people and with efforts to restore the purchasing power of wages and pensions."
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