Cuban YoYo visits homeland, is horrified by food shortages, inflation, and blackouts

From our Bureau of Exiles Who Are Not Really Exiles with some assistance from our Bureau of Bizarre Mentalities and Expectations

What did this woman expect? She was in Cuba. Hell on earth. Honestly, I find it so difficult to understand the YoYo mentality. It’s as if some part of their brain has gone dead. Perhaps it’s the result of all the brainwashing to which they were subjected as children.

Perhaps it’s something more sinister. Could it be that the lunches and snacks given to Cuban schoolchildren are spiked with chemicals that kill or warp specific parts of their brain, especially those make logical and moral reasoning possible?

Anyway, enough about YoYos. Read about her egg odyssey below, which is first-person testimony of how impossibly and painfully difficult life in Cuba has become.

Loosely translated from CiberCuba

A Cuban woman living in Spain went to visit the island and experienced quite an ordeal just trying to buy an egg to make an omelet for her partner.

“It sounds like a joke, but it’s a tragedy,” said Claudia G. Catalán, who had not been to her homeland for over two years.

The young woman traveled to her native Santiago de Cuba to reunite with her family and friends. During her stay, she wanted to prepare an omelet for her Spanish boyfriend, only to realize that there were no eggs left in the house.

This led her to experience firsthand “what Cubans go through to accomplish the most basic daily tasks,” as she shared in a video on her TikTok account.

First, she went to a small business to buy eggs, but they didn’t have any. She then had to wait in line at an ATM to withdraw cash, and from there, she went to a small market where, fortunately, she found eggs, priced at 150 pesos each. However, by the time she returned home, the power had gone out.

The scarcity of eggs in Cuba has driven prices to alarming levels, with a carton now costing over 5,000 pesos on the informal market.

Last week, a Facebook profile under the name Edmundo Dantés Junior denounced the exorbitant cost, noting that “almost a doctor’s salary in my province” is needed to buy a carton of eggs (30 units).

Amidst the severe food crisis in Cuba, rampant inflation has made basic products unattainable for most families.

Miguel Viera, a lawyer well-known on Facebook for his reflections and critiques of Cuban reality, sarcastically commented on the situation. After showing a table with egg shells, he claimed to have “invested almost a dollar in them.”

“And here I am! Waiting for the creative recipe ladies to discover some way to use egg shells. After paying more than 100 pesos for each one… something has to be done with them,” he commented sarcastically.

In July, the cost of a carton of eggs in Havana had already surpassed the country’s minimum wage, reaching an average of 2,225 pesos. Just a month later, the price had skyrocketed.

The National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) reported in its latest report that the year-on-year inflation in Cuba’s formal market reached 30.48% in July, with almost all categories experiencing year-on-year increases above 10%, confirming the sustained loss of purchasing power on the island.

Economist Pedro Monreal stated that the official data from July “confirms the failure of the anti-inflationary component of the 2024 economic package –announced by the regime in a fragmented and inconsistent manner– with a sustained effect of loss of purchasing power” for the population.