A resident of Placetas, a municipality in Villa Clara, documented this week the desperate search for basic food items in their locality: days without eggs available, cartons hoarded by prior orders, and a bottle of oil that costs 4,000 Cuban pesos.
The video, posted on Facebook by the creator known as DeRoche, has garnered over 168,000 views and has become a raw depiction of the food crisis affecting the central part of the country.
The author recounts that for three or four consecutive days, there were no eggs in Placetas. When he finally found some, the line he stood in did not yield the expected result: "I found myself waiting in line to buy a carton of eggs, which ended up being just three little eggs, because all the cartons were already reserved."
He paid 40 pesos per unit. "With three eggs, I couldn't even make myself a scramble in the afternoon," he admits.
The next day, the situation worsened. The same product that cost 40 pesos the day before was now priced at 200 pesos each. "Today I went out again to buy eggs and I came across a carton of eggs, and guess how much it was: it was 200 pesos," she says in the video.
This figure corresponds to the prices recorded this week in other parts of the country. In Old Havana, eggs are around 190 pesos each and a carton exceeds 5,700 pesos; in Alamar, prices are also reported at 200 pesos each. In Placetas itself, local sources place it at 160 pesos.
The search for cooking fat proved equally fruitless. DeRoche visited all the sales points in the municipality looking for lard but found none.
"Cleverly, I almost went on a tour of France looking for butter, but found none," he says with irony. The scarcity has a structural explanation: Villa Clara lost about 181,000 cattle in a decade, with calf mortality due to malnutrition, according to a report from last July that recognized the severe livestock crisis facing the province.
The only available substitute was oil, but at a price that the author describes as unsustainable: 4,000 pesos per bottle.
The uncontrolled rise of oil in Cuba has a clear regulatory trigger: Resolution 150/2026 from the Ministry of Finance and Prices, published on June 20, eliminated the price caps for imported edible oils, repealing previous regulations that set the limit at 990 pesos per liter.
Since then, the price has continued to rise: it was around 1,500 pesos in April, reached 2,000-2,500 pesos in July, and by August it exceeds 4,000 pesos in multiple provinces, with peaks of up to 7,000 pesos in some areas.
The municipal government of Guantánamo attempted to control the situation by setting a "reference price" of 2,200 pesos per liter, but clarified that it was not a mandatory cap, which illustrates the helplessness of local authorities in the face of the uncontrolled rise in prices with no apparent limit.
Villa Clara is also suffering from an energy and food crisis that has lasted for months. In May, power outages of up to twenty hours a day and a shortage of domestic gas led thousands of families to depend on prepared food sold by state entities.
In July, the warehouses in Santa Clara began distributing rations of rice, elbow macaroni, and stew directly to the neighborhoods.
DeRoche ends his video with a question that encapsulates the anguish of thousands of Cubans: “How are the retired elderly doing? How are those who depend on the charity of others to get through the day?”
And their own response leaves no room for optimism: "If we wake up tomorrow and eat, it's thanks to God's great mercy. Because we are eating ourselves alive, consuming money, and money that is not coming in."
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