A consumer enters a supermarket in Miami, another in Los Angeles, and two others in Boston and Atlanta. Each of them buys four pounds of pork. The Miami checkout pays $1,086 for four pounds of pork; the one in Los Angeles pays $1,482, the one in Boston $1,407; and the Atlanta, $716.
It sounds like the beginning of a science fiction story. It is and it isn’t. Because each of those consumers paid for four pounds of pork on the black market the same as Cubans do today, the only one where In Cuba, this precious meat of the national diet is available at an outrageous price of 300 pesos per pound.
I mean, In Cuba, to buy four pounds instead of a huge leg of pork for roasting or a whole pig, you have to pay 1,200 pesoswhich is 57% of a minimum wage in Cuba, which today is 2,100 pesos, which is 17 dollars at the official rate of 123 dollars, but only 12.72 dollars at the real street money market rate of 165 pesos per dollar (on September 13), the counts even for the central bank, even if it does not recognize them.
A worker on that minimum wage of $12.72 a month who bought four pounds of pork would have just $5.45 left over to cover all the other expenses of the month’s staple basket. Isn’t that more of a horror story than science? Fiction?
It is precisely from the hypothetical application of this expropriation of 57% of the minimum wage applicable in 2022 in the states of Florida, California, Massachusetts and Georgia that the fictitious absurd expenses mentioned at the beginning of this article arise.
The difference between these “northern” states and Cuba is the Castro dictatorship to save foreign exchange — who have spent on building hotels to enrich the military — has reduced and almost eliminated imports of animal feed. In addition, he pays very low prices to private pig farmers who are forced to deliver the meat they produce to the state. And private producers who produce “too much” pork are jailed for “illegal enrichment” or face exorbitant fines. As one producer in Holguín, who has already left the business and preferred not to give his name, observed: “The pigs are running out, it’s not a business to raise them.”
Three pounds of chicken is 31% of a full salary
“Every day there is less food,” independent journalist Guillermo del Sol said a few days ago from Santa Clara. “Yesterday a pound of pork was 300 pesos, a pound of beans 100 pesos, rice reached 75 pesos, a carton of eggs with 30 units is between 800 and 1,000 pesos,” the communicator argued.
Eldris González Pozo reported from Santiago de Cuba: “Right now a pound of chicken is 220 pesos and a pack of sausages is 200 pesos and three small loaves of bread are worth 25 pesos.” In other words, to eat three pounds of chicken at home, you have to pay 660 Pay pesos, 31.14% of a monthly minimum wage. It’s like paying $593.52 for three pounds of chicken at a grocery store in Miami (with a state minimum wage of 1,906).
What happened is that the dictatorship Instead of actually doing something effective to combat inflation, it makes it worse day by day. And not just because of incompetence, but because of the cruelty that emanates from Raúl “El Cruel”.
Steve Hanke, renowned professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, was amazed when he found this between August 21st and September 8th Inflation in Cuba rose from 135% to 158% annual rate, and it was consolidated as the second highest inflation in the world (it was back in August) and the one that is growing fastest.
That Excessive cost of living in impoverished Cuba it surpasses Lebanon at 136%, Turkey at 134%, Myanmar at 127% and Venezuela at 125%, which ranks sixth. What cost 100 pesos in Cuba in January 2022 costs more than double today.
The peso is worth less and less. It’s already past the “Special Period” of the 90’s and is listed on the “Street” market (the real one) at 184 pesos. And almost certainly it will surpass 200 pesos before the end of the year.
The pre-Castro peso was never devalued
What a contrast: when Cuba was “exploited by imperialism”, the Cuban currency was never devalued. In 1958, the island had the lowest inflation rate in all of Latin America with only 1.4%. The average rate was that of Mexico at 7.8% and the highest rate of inflation was Bolivia at 63%.
Cuban pesos were then immediately convertible into dollars., give one by one. From the issuance of the first Cuban pesos in 1915 under the government of Mario García Menocal to the rise to power of the Castro brothers, who appointed Che Guevara President of the National Bank of Cuba (November 1959), they have always been at par 1×1. when he knew nothing about banking, finance or the most elementary rules and laws of modern economics.
The Argentine communist replaced none other than the eminent Cuban economist Felipe Pazos, one of the founders of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, at the 1944 Bretton Woods (USA) conference withdrew despite receiving several loans from this global institution.
During the pre-Castro Republican period, the dollar and the peso circulated equally in the country. In fact, they were the same. If you had five Cuban pesos in your pocket, you had five dollars and vice versa.
But there is more. Today’s Cubans do not know (they have no way) that in 1958 Cuban industrial workers were among the best paid in the world. Working an eight-hour day, they earned six dollars a day, a farmhand three dollars. This is how it is recorded in the statistics of the International Labor Organization (ILO) of the UN.
In 1951 a pound of pork cost 0.46% of a salary, today 14%
That Cuban wage of six dollars a day was the eighth highest in the world, behind the United States ($16.80 a day), Canada ($11.73), Sweden ($8.10), Switzerland ($8.00) , New Zealand ($6.72), Denmark ($6.46). , and Norway (6.10).
And with these wages of Cuban workers, according to other statistics published in this case by the magazine Cuba Económica y Financiera, in Cuba in 1951 a pound of pork cost 60 cents, that is 0.46% of the industrial wage of a worker, and not 14% of the minimum wage costing 71 years later. Black beans cost 15 cents a pound in 1951; and an egg costs seven cents, not 33 pesos like today.
is Surrealistic hallucination between the wage-price ratio in capitalist Cuba and the Cuba of Castro’s “continuity” It’s the final point in a chronicle of the absurd that not even Franz Kafka could have imagined: paying more than half a full month’s wages in the market to eat four pounds of pork, which is also some of the easiest to produce and cheapest on this world.