A resident of Santa Clara lamented that Nácar soap is now being sold for 700 and 750 pesos in central areas of the city, a significant increase from the price of 600 pesos recorded just days earlier.
The complaint was published this Saturday by Pablo Javier López Campas in the "UMAP. The Movie." Facebook group. The resident pointed out the sales locations as Ecoa 13 and El Gigante, and questioned those who believed the price would remain at 600 pesos. He also held the Cuban regime responsible for allowing speculators to "massacre the population."
A bar of soap for 750 pesos represents 23.4% of the monthly minimum wage of 3,210 pesos, which has been in effect since July. The government itself has acknowledged that this remuneration is insufficient to cover the basic basket of goods.
The situation in Santa Clara is part of a price hike documented in other municipalities of Villa Clara. Citizen testimonies in the first week of this month indicated that the product was priced at 600 pesos in Placetas; up to 700 in Camajuaní and Santa Clara; between 700 and 800 in Cabaiguán, and up to 800 pesos in Manicaragua. In all cases, these were 100-gram bars.
The increase in prices also affects other hygiene products. A few days ago, a resident of Colón, in Matanzas, reported that soap cost 600 pesos and detergent reached 2,800 pesos per kilogram. "Bathing and washing clothes has become a luxury", she summarized.
At the end of October, the Holguin writer José Poveda Cruz reported that he paid 700 pesos for a bar of soap after touring much of Holguín. In his complaint, he described a dynamic where the disappearance of the product precedes the increase in need and distress, until someone takes advantage of the scarcity to sell it at a much higher price.
Nácar soap was for decades a regulated product, with an official price of 0.25 pesos, according to Resolution 243/2005 from the Ministry of Finance and Prices. It was removed from the ration book in January 2011, and in 2020, the Ministry of Domestic Trade acknowledged that it could not be guaranteed in sufficient quantities for the basic food basket.
The government program Mercados de Barrio, launched in July with the promise of offering prices 15% to 30% lower, does not seem to have produced sufficient results. In a store in Plaza de la Revolución, soap was sold for 530 pesos compared to a reference price of 600, a reduction of just 12%.
The increase occurs in a context of an accumulated inflation of 24.85% between January and September. According to the National Office of Statistics and Information, food accounted for 73.39% of the monthly variation in the consumer price index in September.
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