Eggs in communist Cuba, where the minimum wage is 2,100 pesos a month, are now selling for 3,500 pesos a carton. On top of the exorbitant price, the eggs are bad quality. Another glorious achievement of Cuba’s socialist revolution, where a minimum wage worker must work over a month and a half to earn enough money to buy one carton of eggs.
Via CiberCuba (my translation):
The price of a carton of eggs reaches 3,500 pesos in Havana
Lawyer Manuel Viera denounced on social media the excessive price that eggs have reached in Havana, reaching up to 3,500 Cuban pesos.
An activist also who is popular on social media for his comments and criticisms of the Cuban government, he shared a short video on his Facebook profile where he is seen holding an egg with a serious facial expression.
“3,500 for a carton or 120 pesos for a Cuban-made egg… yolks with white anemia and transparent whites, for me, they will turn into little chicks,” he wrote alongside the clip, which mocks the current situation for egg consumption on the island.
Saying that he questioned the seller about the excessive price, he commented that the seller told him that the 20% increase from the previous price was due to the rise of the dollar.
“When I asked him if he bought the egg in dollars he laughed,” Viera concluded.
The truth is that even before the end of last year, the price of eggs was reaching excessive levels, becoming more of a luxury than a staple of the Cuban diet.
An investigation conducted in February of this year placed the price of a carton of eggs at 2,700 Cuban pesos, slightly less than what was quoted in September 2023, but still above the minimum wage received by a worker on the island (2,100 CUP).
“These prices are unaffordable… There is nothing for the population; however, the MSMEs have everything. Who are the MSMEs? The State, which represses us,” said Luis Sosa Aragón, a Cuban who agreed to speak about his vulnerability, evidenced in the excluding policies implemented by the government of the island.
“We have nothing, absolutely nothing,” emphasized the man, repeating the words denoting concern for the aggravated scarcity experienced in the country.
In this scenario, the government has had to resort to importing the demanded food. It was recently revealed that, in an unprecedented shipment between the two countries and made possible through an agreement established at the past International Fair of Havana (Fihav), Colombia sent two 40-foot containers, equivalent to 518,400 eggs, to Cuba.
However, faced with this scarcity, Cubans have not overlooked a particularity in Cuban stores, as they are given eggs with white yolks in the rationed basket.
“They have neither smell nor taste,” some people who have tried them claim, and they have documented on social media the peculiar finding of eggs with white yolks.
Meanwhile, in the USA, eggs cost at MOST about an hour of minimum wage, $6.00 at most. Most people can afford eggs in the US. I’d be shocked if there was someone in the US who couldn’t, and yet in Cuba, it costs a month’s wage. How unfair.
Give it time.
Biden’s working on it. And at the rate inflation keeps going up, maybe our eggs will eat up several hours’ wages soon and, in time, maybe a week’s pay here.
That’s the way it is with Communism., It creeps up on a country faster than we think.
In 2020, before Biden stole the election, eggs cost less than a dollar a dozen. Already it is five times that much.
Reelect Biden and see how fast it will cost a month’s wages. Maybe not so long.
I’m worried that this country will become Capitommunist (capitalist communist), aka the worst of both worlds, where you have to pay for everything, and nothing is free but you’re not free.