Cuba lifts price caps on staples, anger grows as inflation bites
Yunisleidis Hernández became the face of Cuba's backlash as price caps fell on chicken, oil, milk and pasta, with inflation already at 15.89 percent.
Cuba scrapped price caps on imported staples such as chicken, oil, powdered milk, pasta and sausages, and Yunisleidis Hernández’s stunned reaction quickly became the face of the backlash. The move was formalized in Resolution 150/2026, signed by Finance and Prices Minister Vladimir Regueiro Ale and published in the Extraordinary Official Gazette on June 20, after the ceilings set in July 2024 failed to tame inflation, shortages, informal sales, higher prices and weaker tax collection.
The timing sharpened the hit. Annual inflation reached 15.89 percent in May 2026, food and non-alcoholic beverages rose 19.24 percent, and the official average salary stood at 6,930 pesos, roughly $10. Economist Javier Pérez Capdevila has said a family needs about 96,000 pesos a month for essentials, more than 13 times the average wage and a gap that leaves little room for imported food before the market even adds a markup.
The price pain was already visible in the provinces. In Guantánamo, bottled oil sold for 1,555 pesos per liter and powdered milk for 1,739 pesos per 500 grams even before the caps were lifted, figures that eat up roughly a quarter of the average monthly salary on their own. The government’s 176-measure reform package, presented by Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz on June 18 and 19, is being sold as a broader correction, but the daily arithmetic for shoppers remained brutal.
That is why Hernández struck such a nerve online: her exhaustion read less like a one-off complaint than a shared household ledger. For families trying to buy chicken, oil, milk, pasta and sausages with pesos that lose value and wages that barely move, the end of caps did not feel like a clean market reform. It felt like another round of uncertainty landing on the same empty pockets.
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