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State media admits it cannot contain inflation that pushed prices up 24.85% from January to September
Prices of goods and services in Cuba rose 24.85% between January and September 2026, and September's year-on-year inflation reached 28.44%, according to official figures reported by Cubanet and CiberCuba.
Cuba's state press acknowledges the difficulty of containing inflation that pushed the prices of goods and services up 24.85% between January and September, according to Cubanet, which headlines its piece on that coverage "no solution in sight".
The year-on-year measure runs higher: official inflation reached 28.44% in September, according to the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) as cited by CiberCuba. These are two different and non-comparable indicators: the 24.85% is the cumulative figure for the year's first nine months, while the 28.44% measures September against the same month a year earlier. Over that same year-on-year period, food and non-alcoholic beverages rose 42.66%, which, according to the same outlet, accounts for almost three quarters of the monthly change in the price index.
CiberCuba lists what those figures mean on the street: onions at 910 pesos each, cooking oil between 4,000 and 6,000 pesos a litre, trays of eggs between 3,000 and 4,500 pesos, and meat at 800 pesos a pound. The monthly minimum wage has been 3,210 pesos since July.
The outlet starts from a video by a man in Cuba showing a pumpkin that cost him 2,700 pesos, 84% of the minimum wage, which has drawn more than 890,000 views on Facebook. "I can afford it, but the whole country cannot," he says in the recording, in remarks translated by Yamacoa. Yamacoa is not publishing his name.
CiberCuba attributes part of the surge to an administrative decision: Resolution 150/2026 of the Finance and Prices Ministry, in force since June 2026, removed price caps on several imported foods. The same outlet cites estimates by independent economists that a person needs around 96,000 pesos a month to cover basic needs.
Sources: Cubanet · CiberCuba
Data updated: 2026-11-01T16:15:00.000Z