A retiree from Trinidad, Cuba, summarized in under a minute the desperation of millions of elderly people on the island.
Mariano Matienzo, 70 years old, posted a video on Facebook where he poses an unanswered question: how to survive an entire month with 4,000 Cuban pesos after 45 years of work.
"I don't care about Putin, Maduro, Bukele, Trump, Obama, Raúl, Díaz-Canel, Marrero... any of them works for me," Mariano says calmly and straightforwardly.
“All I want is for someone to tell me how, with 4,000 pesos, after 45 years of working, I can eat for an entire month,” he added.
The message concludes with a phrase that encapsulates everything: "This is not a political problem; this is a matter of survival."
The video amassed over 45,000 views, more than 1,300 reactions, and nearly 200 comments, as it addresses an open wound that affects over 1.7 million retirees in Cuba.
The minimum pension of 4,000 pesos was established by Resolution 14/2025 of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, effective from September 2025, and benefits 79% of the country's pensioners.
However, with the informal dollar trading between 545 and 660 pesos in June 2026, those 4,000 pesos amount to just 7 or 8 dollars monthly.
The gap between that figure and the actual cost of living is stark. Economists estimate that a person needs around 96,000 pesos a month to cover basic necessities, about 24 times more than the minimum pension. Basic food alone amounts to around 70,000 pesos per month.
In Trinidad, the city where Mariano lives, prices at the markets illustrate the magnitude of the problem: charcoal is sold for 3,500 pesos and oil for 1,800 pesos, which means that with 4,000 pesos, a pensioner can barely buy one or two products.
A Cuban influencer demonstrated in June 2026 that with 3,000 pesos —the actual pension of a retired friend— it is not possible to make even a minimal grocery purchase for a month.
Other testimonials collected in May 2026 are equally compelling: retirees claim that their pension lasts no more than a week.
"In five, six, seven, or eight days, the money is gone," one of them recounted.
The misery of pensions is compounded by the ordeal of collecting them. In June 2026, the government of Granma admitted it did not have sufficient funds to pay its 111,000 retirees, forcing the elderly to stand in lines for four to six hours under the sun to receive an amount that is not enough to survive.
The case of Mariano is not isolated. In April 2026, another retiree with 40 years of work received a pension of 3,727 pesos —less than eight dollars— and had to wait eight months to collect the first payment. With that money, he could only buy potatoes, sugar, rice, and charcoal.
Between September 2025 and June 2026, the purchasing power of the minimum pension fell by nearly 30%, dropping from less than $10 to under $8.
Mariano sums it up better than any statistic: "Whoever resolves that situation for me, I will be grateful for the rest of my life."
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