Price of eggs in Cuba skyrockets to 4,500 pesos per carton

From our Bureau of Socialist Golden Eggs with some assistance from our Bureau of Socialist Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice

How’s this for social justice? Eggs so costly that you need two months of your annual income to purchase them. So, who gets to buy eggs? Apparatchiks. Diplomats. Tourists. Cubans who receive remittances from the diaspora or gifts from visiting YoYos. If you don’t fall into one of those categories, forget about eggs.

Loosely translated from Marti Noticias

The price of eggs in Cuba has skyrocketed in recent weeks. Cubans interviewed by Martí Noticias report that the average price is around 4,500 Cuban pesos, which is more than two minimum wages.

“In Matanzas, a carton of eggs costs between 4,000 and 4,500 pesos,” said Aida González, an elderly woman who spent the morning searching various markets in the city, trying to find the best price.

The minimum wage on the island is around 2,100 pesos (about $7 at the informal market exchange rate).

“In Holguín, on Monday, a carton of eggs couldn’t be found for less than 4,600 pesos,” said a Facebook user.

A search through buy-and-sell groups on social media indicates that in most provinces, the price of eggs has surged. While a few months ago the price was around 2,900 pesos, now it doesn’t drop below 4,000.

The crisis has affected many private businesses, such as bakeries. “We are not taking orders because we don’t have eggs,” said the owner of a small business specializing in birthday cakes in Havana to the newspaper 14ymedio a few weeks ago.

The country’s egg production dropped from five million daily in 2020 to 2.2 million in 2023, according to official figures. Agriculture Minister Ydael Pérez Brito commented at the end of last year that the crisis worsened due to the shortage of laying hens.

“Today we only have an average of 2.903 million laying hens. After the pandemic, we couldn’t acquire the vaccines, and the replacement program was halted. This has caused us to work with a very high percentage of aging hens,” explained the official on the program Mesa Redonda.

According to figures published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in November 2023, Havana purchased over a million dollars’ worth of eggs from the U.S., an unprecedented amount for that product.

Cuban authorities have acknowledged on several occasions the delay in delivering eggs from the basic food basket.

“Poultry production in Cuba is at 50% of capacity, both in the number of animals and in production,” said Jorge Luis Parapar López, president of the Food and Poultry Business Group (Gealav), to the official press.

“More than 50% of the hens in Cuba are in their second forced molt, meaning their second productive cycle, and some even in a third, when the ideal is only one. These old hens do not have the expected productivity,” he added.