The Holguín writer José Poveda Cruz published a post on Facebook on Thursday that, with the irony characteristic of his style, depicts with surgical precision the struggle of a Cuban to fill a plate: potatoes are around 1,000 pesos per pound, onions reach 1,500, and meat has become, in his own words, products that "one ends up knowing by name and remembering by heart."
The text, titled "The Rice for the Pigeons and Other Forms of Inflation", begins with the story of a neighbor named Zenaida, who used to go to Calixto García Park in Holguín to feed the pigeons rice. A simple act of kindness that inflation has turned into a luxury.
Poveda Cruz describes his own experience at the market stalls with a mix of humor and resignation: "Perhaps losing sight may have some advantages: there are prices that it would be better not to distinguish too clearly."
Regarding the potato —which costs around 1,000 pesos per pound and is often poorly weighed— the writer suggests, with sharp sarcasm: "We should organize a national contest to reward the honest seller of root vegetables and produce. With a diploma, a medal, and coverage from the international press. It would be newsworthy for someone to weigh exactly what they sell."
The onion, priced at 1,500 pesos, deserves its own ironic description: “beautiful, large, reddish, with an air of aristocracy on the stand.” Sweet potatoes and cassava, at about 100 pesos per pound, are presented as the only foods that still maintain some connection with the common purse, although Poveda Cruz warns that “their prices also do not correspond to wages.”
Those prices are not a literary exaggeration: onion was reported at 1,500 pesos per pound in Santiago de Cuba at the beginning of November, reaching highs of up to 2,000 pesos in some areas.
The contrast with income is striking. The official minimum wage was set at 3,210 pesos per month since July 2026 — an amount that the Ministry of Labor itself acknowledged as insufficient to cover the basic basket — while the average state salary hovers around 7,354 pesos, equivalent to less than 9 dollars at the informal exchange rate.
Meeting the basic needs of a single person requires approximately between 50,000 and 96,060 pesos per month, which is about 14 times the average salary. A pound of onions at 1,500 pesos accounts for nearly half of the monthly minimum wage on its own.
This is not the first report in which Poveda Cruz documents the decline. In July, he had already described how the most basic necessities seem like luxury items, with rice and beans priced at 400 pesos per pound and oil at 2,200 pesos per liter. In September, he published a piece about lighting charcoal as a new household discipline, following the indefinite suspension of liquefied gas in the eastern provinces. In October, he recounted 28 days without water in his home in Holguín. This week’s text is the latest chapter in that accumulated chronicle of hardship.
The writer reminisces about his youth in the Soviet Union, when he survived on boiled potatoes topped with an egg: "Back then, it was a modest meal; today it would seem like a feast fit for the gods."
The conclusion of the text is as precise as it is bitter: "Cuban cuisine, which for so long was a space for family creativity, has become a calculation office. Every ingredient must justify its presence, and every purchase seems to require a small negotiation with the wallet."
Poveda Cruz anticipates a "peculiar end of the year" and concludes with a warning that goes beyond gastronomy: "What would be concerning is reaching the point where we have to calculate even the amount of goodness we can afford. And that would indeed be an unforgivable action."
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