From our Bureau of Highly Praised and Admired Socialist Economies
While Castro, Inc. is busy selling Cuba to the highest bidder, the vast majority of Cubans face an impossible situation: shortages of food and other essential goods coupled with inflation and stagnant salaries.
As if this were not bad enough, the Cuban Peso just hit an all-time low rate of exchange with the US Dollar.
It’s a potentially lethal one-two punch: lack of food coupled with unaffordable prices. Socialism at its finest.
Loosely translated from Diario de Cuba
Year-on-year inflation in the Cuban state market stood at 45.48% in May, compared to 26.16% in the same month of 2022 and 45.36% last April, reported the state National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), which confirms that the pocket of Cubans is increasingly precarious.
According to the report, which summarizes the official figures of the consumer price index, the increase in the cost of living has been mainly due to the increase in what people pay for food and gastronomic services.
According to ONEI, the consumer price index increased by 3.64% in May compared to April. By categories, the year-on-year increase in food and non-alcoholic beverages stood out (66.48% more), followed by restaurants and hotels (65.02%), transportation (29.45%), goods and various services (22.78% ), furniture and household items (20.67%) and education (20.89%).
Only in May, a month in which the fuel crisis hit transportation on the Island, prices in that sector rose by 9.30%, a very conservative figure if one takes into account that private taxi fares, despite having been capped by the Government, today depend on supply and demand.
The increase in prices has not stopped since 2021, when the Government imposed the package of the Ordering Task, promising to solve the problems of the national economy, but which has resulted in an increase in poverty and precariousness of Cuban families, as well as in the height of the historical migratory exodus that the country is experiencing.
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