Do they pay half the salary in Miami for four pounds of pork? Yes in Cuba.

The consumer enters the supermarket Miami, one in Los Angeles, and two more in Boston and Atlanta. Each of them buys four pounds of pork. The person from Miami pays $1,086 at the checkout for four pounds of pork; The person in Los Angeles pays 1,482 dollar, that Boston 1407 1; and Atlanta, $716.

Sounds like the beginning of a science fiction story. It is, and it is not. Because every one of these consumers paid the same amount as today’s Cubans for four pounds of pork in the United States Black marketthe only one in it Cuba has that precious meat from the national diet, at an unheard of price of 300 pesos per pound.

I mean, In Cuba to buy, not a huge leg of pork to roast, or a whole pig, but four pounds, you have to pay 1200 pesoswhich is 57% of the minimum wage in Cuba, which today is 2,100 pesos, or 17 dollars at the official rate of 123 dollars, but only 12.72 dollars with the real street money market rate of 165 pesos per dollar (on September 13), which is Which matters even for the central bank, even if it does not recognize it.

A worker with that minimum salary of $12.72 a month who bought four pounds of pork has only $5.45 left to cover all other expenses for this month’s basic food basket, isn’t that a horror story, not a science? imagination?

Precisely from the application of the hypothesis of this stripping of 57% of the minimum wage in force in 2022 in the states of Florida, California, Massachusetts and Georgia, is the emergence of those ridiculous phantom expenses mentioned at the beginning of this article.

The difference between those “northern” states and Cuba is that Castro’s dictatorship to save foreign currency – Which I already spent on construction Hotels To make the army richer – he reduced the import of animal feed and almost abolished. Moreover, he pays very low prices to pig farmers in the private sector, who are forced to deliver the meat produced to the state. They also imprison or impose heavy fines on private producers who produce “too much” of pork for “illegal enrichment”. As one Holguin producer who has already left the business and preferred to remain anonymous stated: “Pigs are running out, there is no work to raise them.”

Three pounds of chicken costs 31% of full salary

“Every day there is less food,” said freelance journalist Guillermo del Sol a few days before Santa Clara. Yesterday a pound of pork sold for 300 pesos, 100 pesos of beans, 75 pesos rice, and a carton of eggs containing 30 units costed between 800 and 1,000 pesos.”

From Santiago de Cuba, Eldrís González Pozo said, “At the moment a pound of chicken costs 220 pesos, a box of sausages is 200 pesos, and three small loaves is worth 25 pesos.” In other words, to eat three pounds of chicken at home, you have to pay 660 pesos, which is 31.14% of the minimum monthly wage. It’s like paying $593.52 for three pounds of chicken in a Miami supermarket (minimum wage of 1,906 in the state).

What happens is that the dictatorship, Instead of doing something effective to combat inflation, it is exacerbating it day by day. Not only because of incompetence, but because of the cruelty that mainly stems from Raoul “The Tough”.

Steve Hanke, the distinguished professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, was astonished when he discovered this between August 21 and September 8 The inflation In Cuba from 135% to 158% annual rate, And it was standardized as the second highest inflation in the world (it was already in August), and the fastest rising.

The Escape the cost of living in poor Cuba It surpasses 136% in Lebanon, 134% in Turkey, 127% in Myanmar, and 125% in Venezuela in sixth place. In Cuba, what it cost 100 pesos in January 2022, it has now more than doubled.

The value of the peso is lower and lower. Already left behind “special period” From the nineties and Its price is 184 pesos in the “street” market. (Real). It is almost certain that before the end of the year it will exceed 200 pesos.

Castro’s ex peso has not been devalued

What a contradiction: when Cuba was “exploited” by imperialism, the Cuban currency was never devalued. In 1958, the island recorded the lowest inflation rate in all of Latin America By only 1.4%. The average rate was that of Mexico at 7.8%, and Bolivia experienced the highest inflation rate of 63%.

Then the Cuban peso became instantly convertible into dollars., one after another. It has always been at the 1×1 level since the first Cuban peso was issued in 1915, in the government Mario Garcia Menocaluntil the Castro Brothers attack on power, who appointed Che Guevara President of the National Bank of Cuba (November 1959), when he knew nothing of banking, finance, or the basic rules and laws of the modern economy.

The Argentine Communist did not replace the prominent Cuban economist Felipe Pazos, one of the founders of International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank at the Bretton Woods Conference (USA) in 1944. One of the first things that the new “revolutionary” head of the Central Bank did was to withdraw Cuba from the International Monetary Fund, although it received several credits from this world institution.

During the pre-Castro republican phase, the dollar and the peso circulated in the country equally. In fact, they were the same. Whoever had five Cuban pesos in his pocket had five dollars and vice versa.

But there is more. Cubans today do not know (they have no way) that in 1958 Cuban industrial workers were among the best-paid workers in the world. They earned six dollars a day for eight hours, and a farm worker three dollars. This is how it is recorded in the statistics of the International Labor Organization (ILO) of the United Nations.

In 1951, a pound of pork cost 0.46% of the salary, today 14%

This six-dollar-a-day Cuban wage was the eighth highest in the world, after the United States ($16.80 a day), Canada ($11.73), Sweden ($8.10), Switzerland ($8.00), and New Zealand ($6.72), and Denmark ($6.46). and Norway (6.10).

This is the salary of Cuban workers, according to other statistics published by the magazine in this case Cuba economic and financialIn 1951 in Cuba, a pound of pork was 60 cents, 0.46% of the average industrial salary for a worker, not 14% of the minimum wage 71 years later. 1951 black beans were 15 cents a pound. An egg is seven cents, not 33 pesos like today.

he is A surreal hallucination between the wage-price relationship in capitalist Cuba and Castro’s “continuity” in Cuba It is the last point in the narrative of absurd events that not even Franz Kafka himself would have imagined: paying more than half of his full monthly salary at the market to eat four pounds of pork, also one of the easiest to produce and eat. Cheapest in this world.