A retired person from Havana visited this week the restaurant El Mandarín, located on La Rampa in Vedado, and found an empty dining room, with no patrons and the mezzanine bar closed. What used to be an everyday lunch accessible to any worker now costs up to 2,200 Cuban pesos for a single dish, according to the menu photographed at the venue.
In those years of the nineties and the first decade of this century, the prices of food and drinks were within everyone's reach, and we could indulge ourselves, during lunch —it didn’t have to be a birthday— by going in and enjoying Chinese dumplings, ravioli, fried rice, or simply having some Chinese soup or savoring sweet and sour pork,” wrote Cesareo Navas y Morlanes, former audiovisual producer of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT) on Facebook.
"Now, due to those of the 'continuity,' nothing is the same: the little butterfly costs 750.00 pesos, the sweet and sour pork 1,400.00 and so on, it's shocking," Navas stated, using the term with which the Cuban regime referred to Miguel Díaz-Canel's administration as a continuation of Raúl and Fidel Castro.
On the menu at El Mandarín, among other items, the pork mass costs 2,200 pesos (145 grams) and the platter is offered for 1,300 pesos (188 grams). With the minimum pension in Cuba of 4,000 pesos per month, a sweet and sour pork dish at El Mandarín represents 35% of that pension.
"Due to the soaring and uncontrollable inflation, along with other grievous damages that we, the ordinary Cubans, endure—especially the retirees—we cannot enjoy any restaurants or other tourist centers. We are barred. 'They exist, but they're not for you,' lamented Navas. The prices in the restaurant and hotel sector in Cuba increased by 39.11% year-on-year in September 2026, surpassing the official overall inflation rate of 28.44%, according to data from the state statistics agency."
Navas recalls that the bar on the mezzanine of the Mandarín—known among ICRT workers as "the mezzanine office"—was a meeting point for directors, cameramen, sound engineers, actors, and producers. There, amidst cigars, rums, and beers, work teams were formed, and artistic projects took shape. This gastronomic and cultural life of La Rampa now belongs to a different era.
"I decided to go up to the Mandarín, not to eat or drink—my wallet is both here and not here—but simply to see the place again: What a disaster, they dragged a dead body out! The dining room is empty, without any diners, and, the saddest part, is seeing the bar not in service. CLOSED," wrote the retiree.
El Mandarín is a historic restaurant in Havana that even appears in the film Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968), by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Navas concluded his publication with a phrase that encapsulates the feelings of many Cubans: “What a pity for the country we have! This wrong cannot last any longer.”
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