Less than three weeks before the start of the school year, a Cuban mother published on Facebook a photo holding a bottle of sunflower oil and a package of sausages to illustrate a question that encapsulates the struggle of thousands of families on the island: what will the children take for snack to school?
Maday Cuba Tamayo, the author of the publication, recalls that a few months ago children were already coming to class with very humble snacks: bread with oil or bread with hot dogs. "It was tough because not everyone can," she wrote. Now, with oil costing 4,000 pesos and sausages at 1,200 pesos, even those minimal options are out of reach for most.
"Just a few days before classes start in Cuba, and all I can say is that a few months ago there were many children who took bread with oil or bread with hot dog for their snack, and it was a struggle because not everyone can afford it... and now I wonder what the kids will take since oil costs $4000 and hot dogs $1200—where are we headed... not to mention uniforms, backpacks, shoes... and transportation," the woman wrote.
The trigger for this escalation was the Resolution 150/2026 of the Ministry of Finance and Prices, published in the Official Gazette on June 20, 2026, which removed the price caps on retail for imported cooking oils, cut chicken, powdered milk, pasta, and sausages. Prior to that measure, the price of a liter of oil was capped at 990 Cuban pesos.
What followed was an uncontrolled surge in the price of oil: about 1,500 pesos in April, 2,000 in June, 2,500 in Havana at the end of July, and between 4,000 and 7,000 pesos in various provinces at the beginning of August.
In the midst of the chaos, some municipal governments—Guantánamo, Holguín, and Songo-La Maya—attempted to establish reference prices ranging from 2,200 to 2,500 pesos per liter, although without a maximum cap, which in practice did not halt the increase.
The mother's complaint comes at a time when the return to school is faced with multiple shortages. The Ministry of Domestic Trade acknowledged that only 2.3 million of the 3.6 million uniform items needed for the 2026-2027 school year will be produced, leaving around 80% of the students without new uniforms. In the informal market, a uniform can exceed 5,000 pesos.
The economic background exacerbates all of the above. The official average salary in Cuba is around 7,074 pesos per month —less than 13 dollars at the informal exchange rate— while journalistic and academic estimates place the cost of covering the basic needs of a single person at around 96,000 pesos per month.
In this context, the World Food Program launched a six-month emergency school feeding project on July 1st in the five eastern provinces, benefiting 12,677 children in 74 educational centers.
Maday Cuba Tamayo's question —"Where are we headed?"— encapsulates the anguish of an average Cuban family that, with the start of the school year set for September first, does not know how to afford even the simplest snack for their children.
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