A Cuban woman posted a video on TikTok on Wednesday that starkly summarizes the economic reality of the island: she went out to make a basic household purchase and spent 30,350 Cuban pesos, equivalent to approximately 46 dollars. The message that opens the clip says it all: “the hardest thing to buy in Cuba is no longer finding the products, but being able to afford them”.
The list of products shown by the user @lili.cubana does not include luxuries: oil, spaghetti, powdered milk, sugar, rice, Goya seasoning, detergents, toothpaste, laundry soap, and bath soap. A purchase that any family would consider essential, but whose cost exceeds four average monthly salaries in Cuba, where the official average income is around 6,930 Cuban pesos, less than 13 dollars at the informal exchange rate.
"Every time I go out to buy something, I ask myself the same question: how much longer will prices keep rising?" the author says in the video. Her strategy for dealing with uncertainty is to buy several items at once, "not because I have extra money, but because you never know how much things will cost next week."
This uncertainty is grounded in concrete data. The dollar in the Cuban informal market soared from 435 pesos in December 2025 to 670 pesos on July 7, 2026, marking an accelerated depreciation that undermines the purchasing power of those who rely on the Cuban peso. Products such as rice (25 kg bag) went from 30,000 to 31,800 pesos in just 48 hours, and the price of one liter of oil jumped from between 1,150 and 1,400 pesos to 1,800 pesos in the same timeframe.
The regime worsened the situation in June by removing the caps on retail prices for chopped chicken, oils, and powdered milk through Resolution 150/2026, leaving those products at the mercy of the market without any official brakes.
“Before, you would go out with an idea of how much you were going to spend; today, you leave with a budget and yet it almost never covers everything,” sums up the Cuban in the clip. This description aligns with estimates from independent economists, who calculate that covering the basic needs of a person in Cuba requires around 96,060 pesos per month, about 14 times the official average salary.
In that context, the purchase of 30,350 pesos depicted in the video is not an extraordinary expense: it is just a third of what a single person would need per month to survive, according to those same estimates.
The phenomenon of Cubans showcasing their purchases on social media has solidified in 2026 as a form of social protest. In June, a video by user @mily_pastel displaying a purchase of 180 dollars in Camagüey accumulated over 1.3 million views, highlighting internationally the gap between salaries and prices on the island.
The government of Díaz-Canel responded to the crisis in June by increasing the minimum wage to 3,210 Cuban pesos — a 53% increase compared to 2021 — and announced that the subsidized basic basket will be restricted solely to retirees, families with chronically ill children, and people in vulnerable situations, eliminating the generalized subsidy that had historically softened the impact of prices on the population.
"When it comes time to pay, that's when you really feel the hit on your wallet," concludes the video's author, in a phrase that encapsulates what millions of Cubans experience each week in front of the shelves.
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