The Cuban content creator identified as Yaneisy Canta showcased in a video on Facebook how much it costs to prepare a single meal in Cuba: 2,400 pesos for two pounds of ground chicken and a package of rice, the cheapest products she found available in her town.
"The real budget for eating in Cuba. This time I went for the cheapest options and what I had on hand. Cuba is going through very tough situations, and food is one of them," says the woman at the beginning of the video, which has nearly 58,000 views.
The author lives in a town far from the city, where food options are limited and what you seek is not always available. That day, what was available was chicken picadillo at 1,400 pesos for two pounds and rice at 1,000 pesos per package.
"I can't buy the foods I like here. Simply because they don't sell them or because they don't make them," he explains.
The price of chicken picadillo -the cheapest protein source accessible to millions of Cuban families- is 700 pesos per pound, a figure that even exceeds the recent records of price increases for the product, which had already jumped from 450 to 600 pesos in just a few days by the end of August.
Yaneisy makes the calculation in front of the camera: "For an average Cuban, that is indeed a lot of money. Just imagine a Cuban spending 2,400 pesos a day. That would amount to 74,400 pesos a month."
This projection of the young woman at 74,400 pesos exceeds more than ten times the average state salary in Cuba, which according to data from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) is around 6,930 pesos per month, and more than 23 times the minimum wage of the budgeted sector, set at 3,210 pesos in July.
The most recent increase in the price of picadillo coincides with the widespread price instability triggered by Resolution 150/2026 from the Ministry of Finance and Prices, which removed national price caps for chicken, oil, powdered milk, pasta, and sausages. Although MDM picadillo was not included, the domino effect was immediate. The price of chicken rose from 3,000 to over 7,000 pesos in some areas of the country.
Weeks after the publication of that regulation, the ceiling on rice, another staple food, was also lifted.
Economist Javier Pérez Capdevila estimated that a person needs around 96,060 pesos per month to cover basic needs, of which 70,070 pesos would be solely for food.
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