The Cuban content creator Emanuel Gonzalez Moral published a video on Facebook on Monday, in which he showcases, product by product, what can be purchased with 15 dollars converted to Cuban pesos on the island, an amount that barely suffices to fill a small bag of basic groceries.
With about 8,000 Cuban pesos, roughly equivalent to 15 dollars at the informal rate, González gathered the following: a bottle of ketchup, two cans of tuna, two packages of pasta, four packages of rice, a hair cream, a can of condensed milk, six cans of brown malt, and two bags of flour.
"I live in Cuba, and this is what can be bought with 15 dollars converted into national currency," says the young man at the start of the video, recorded with the help of a follower who provided him with the money for the purchase.
At the end, he set aside a portion of the products to take to his grandparents, with whom he lives. "Everything that comes into my house is shared with them because they are my life," he explained in front of the camera.
The format of showing what can be bought with X amount of dollars in Cuba has turned into a viral genre on the island's social media, functioning as a gauge of public sentiment in a crisis that continues to deepen.
The price of food and power outages have turned feeding oneself into a luxury for millions of Cubans. The average official salary between January and April was 7,074 CUP per month—between 13 and 17 dollars at the informal exchange rate—while the minimum wage, set at 3,210 CUP since July, amounts to just 4.65 dollars.
Independent estimates suggest that a person needs around 96,000 CUP per month to cover their basic needs, of which about 70,000 CUP is solely for food. This means that the average salary barely covers 10% of the minimum food basket.
The prices in the informal market illustrate the extent of the collapse, where the egg reached 135 pesos per unit in Las Tunas and up to 300 CUP in Holguín; a pound of pork is sold for 850 CUP at markets in Sancti Spíritus and between 1,000 and 1,500 CUP in Havana; vegetable oil exceeds 3,500 CUP per liter, surpassing the entire monthly minimum wage.
The regime eliminated the national price caps on oil, chicken, powdered milk, pasta, and sausages through Resolution 150/2026 in June, and in July, Decree 156 also lifted the cap on rice, unleashing an inflationary spiral that the government itself acknowledges it cannot stop.
The newspaper Girón, the organ of the Communist Party in Matanzas, acknowledged that the State can do "little or nothing" in the face of inflation, and that "the margin of maneuver is extremely limited under the current circumstances."
The economist Pedro Monreal summarized the outcome of the regime's policies with a phrase: "176 measures and only one achievement: to show that they learned nothing".
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