From our Bureau of Socialist Social Justice with some assistance from our Bureau of Varieties of Apartheid
Yes, how’s this for social justice? If you don’t have relatives who can send you dollars, a half-liter bottle of water can cost you more than ten times a half-liter of gasoline. Yes, that’s a fact. Gasoline is more expensive if purchased with pesos than dollars. If you have dollars, that half liter of gasoline will only cost you 11 U.S. cents, but if you only have pesos it will cost you the equivalent of 62 U.S. cents.
Consequently, if you don’t have dollars, filling up a typical tank with gasoline will cost you more than half your month wage of 2,100 pesos.
Leave it to Castro, Inc. to set up yet another form of apartheid. Vamos bien!
From Granma Euro-Lite (Reuters)
Cuban gasoline, already one of the world’s best bargains, is getting cheaper by the day for those with access to dollars, as the local peso currency continues its freefall against the greenback.
“Special” (94 octane) gasoline sells on the Caribbean island nation for 30 pesos, or 11 cents per liter (42 cents/gallon) at the current black market exchange rate, among the world’s cheapest fuel, according to online database GlobalPetrolPrices.com.
A typical half-liter of bottled water in Cuba, by comparison, sells for between 100 and 200 pesos, more than ten times the price of the same quantity of gasoline.
Communist-run Cuba has subsidized gasoline for decades, since early in former leader Fidel Castro’s revolution.
Meanwhile, the dollar, which Cubans obtain primarily through remittances or tourism, has soared from a value of 170 pesos a year ago to 270 pesos on the black market on Tuesday, giving those who have dollars far more purchasing power for products, like fuel, still tagged in pesos.
For a Cuban who lives on pesos alone, however, filling up the typical tank costs more than half the monthly minimum wage of 2,100 pesos.
This sort of thing is totally “normalized” in Cuba. Everyone who can is living off the “diaspora” because that’s the path of least resistance and precisely what the regime wants and expects. Nobody on the island expects the state to do much except protect its power by any means necessary. It’s generalized parasitism.