On the blackboard, the “no” that accompanies the rice box is barely visible. It is an undeserved discretion. It should be in the foreground, like the bad news it is for the great majority of people who have this cereal as their base of culinary operations.
“I plan to buy a small sack for Monday,” announces the clerk at this small agricultural market in one of the southern neighborhoods of Havana. The promise is an attempt to “compensate” for the customers’ frustration.
“How much are you going to sell it for?” asks a user who desperately asks about the product. It’s Sunday, it’s almost noon, and he’s trying to look for something to make lunch at home, where his elderly parents are waiting for him “and a 17-year-old nephew who eats like a savage.” So far he has “a bunch of burro bananas” and a package of sausages worth 600 pesos.
“At 280 or 300,” the clerk answers. “That’s why I’m just going to buy a small sack. They sell me a pound for 250, more or less. If not, the numbers won’t add up, buddy,” he apologizes and he shields himself behind the “poor” profit margin he would obtain. Less than 20% for each pound.
Grocers’ math
A margin of 20% per pound could be quite a haul in other circumstances; but, given the prevailing volatility, it’s not much. Just 14 cents at the informal exchange rate. About 3,000 pesos of profit for the sack (freight not included), which is equivalent to about 9 USD or a carton of 30 eggs.
In the formation of the CPI — Consumer Price Index — in Cuba, some links may be exotic to the classical ones.
On the supply side, the origin of the product should be taken into account, which in many cases tends to be opaque or downright black.
In the case of rice, it could come from a state warehouse or a harvester in Pinar del Río or Granma, two of the main rice producers on the island.
There are risk premiums for the origin of the former, which makes the sack cheaper for the buyer. Moving from illegality forces its holders to look for hurried sales and, therefore, at a lower price.
In April 2023, the price for state sales of the cereal was established for the entire country at 72 pesos per pound. Today it is 160 pesos, more than double, while in the informal market, it climbed from 120 pesos per pound to 300 in February 2025. In just two years, the grain is making strides, while salaries ― some ― are barely growing in small steps.
In the first half of 2024, the average salary in state enterprises reached approximately 4,856 pesos, which represents an increase of 15.1% compared to the previous year, against a close to 25% state market inflation, according to an official report.
MSME circuit
Just a few meters from the stand, a private grocery store operates in parallel. It is open, but there is no one buying. The one-kilogram package of Mexican rice sells for 820 pesos. It is the only option, but it is out of the reach of most consumers.
“Yes, it is annoying, but if things get difficult, someone will surely buy it,” ventures the seller, while swinging a plastic bottle with water that serves to scare away flies.
In all the MSMEs visited by OnCuba, five in total, and spread across an inter-municipal geography, imported packages — from Mexico or Colombia — of one kilo of rice fluctuated around 800 pesos.
“Don’t look for it cheaper, you’re going to waste your time,” the employee of one of the grocery stores on the border between the municipalities of Plaza and Centro Habana warned a customer.
In 2023, the average salary in Cuba was 4,648 pesos per month, according to the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI). Thus, a kilo of the cereal, traditionally a key piece of the puzzle — always elementary — of the basic Cuban diet, represents 17% of the average monthly salary.
The year-on-year inflation in state commerce remains sky-high but has been progressively de-escalating. At the end of 2024, the indicator stood at 24.88%, which represents a slowdown compared to the 31.3% recorded at the end of 2023.
Austericide?
The real cause of such a decline is not an improvement in the economy, but a brutal contraction of public spending — an austericide (counterproductive austerity) in economic jargon — which works as a bilge pump for the enormous fiscal deficit, one of the black beasts of the island’s economy. It is estimated that even today it captures between 10% and 12% of GDP.
According to Cubadebate, in 2024, cuts in public spending — which amounted to 32 billion pesos — converged with an “over-compliance” in revenues, above 25 billion pesos, through taxation and, above all, fines to the private sector.
In just eight weeks in the summer of 2024, fines were close to 350 million pesos, according to data provided by the government.
For Minister of Finance and Prices Vladimir Regueiro, in December there was encouraging news. “The deficit structure is shifting to capital expenditures (investments), which, logically, have future income.”
The official outlook for 2025 contains inflation projections that vary between 20% and 30%, which still places it in the range of galloping inflation.
Fairs
Last Sunday, an agricultural fair was held a couple of blocks from an MSME.
Organized by the Provincial Delegation of Agriculture of Havana, these itinerant markets sell at less prohibitive prices than private ones — perhaps between 10% and 30% — but there are complaints from citizens that this is not always the case.
There were reports that in John Lennon Park in Vedado, low-quality local rice was sold for 240 pesos per pound, with the addition that it had to be purchased as part of a combo with a bag of beans, which raised the total cost to 1,400 pesos.
However, on the same day, at the fair on General Lee Avenue in the Santos Suárez neighborhood, the price of rice was fair: 160 pesos per pound, five times less than in the MSME import circuit.
There was only one problem: there were four sacks and 5 pounds per capita for an expectant crowd that exceeded one hundred.
After several altercations, scuffles, and protests, the police had to intervene to impose order on the line. “They finished like water,” said an angry customer referring to the sacks, showing her empty bag.
Delays
Like other basic products, delays in the delivery of rationed rice are accumulating for months.
This month, February 2025, 2 pounds — of a total of 5 — corresponding to December 2024 are being distributed, although there are provinces where the cereal debts go back further.
In April 2024, at the Mesa Redonda TV program, Minister of Domestic Trade Betsy Díaz specified that monthly demand for rice exceeds 34,000 tons to distribute 7 pounds per capita (5 on the ration book and 2 extra).
For his part, President Díaz-Canel, in the same program, said that the country must ensure, each month, more than 230 million dollars destined to the purchase of food for the population. Given the delays, it is evident that the amount is not available.
Falling production and a new social contract
At the same time, the country is facing a decline in rice production. In 1985, Cuba produced 524,000 tons of grain. By 2023, the figure dropped to 27,000 tons: just 5.32% of the production of four decades ago.
Difficulties in accessing fertilizers, the machinery’s absence or obsolescence, limited hydraulic resources, and the fuel shortage, among other ills, have formed a perfect storm to ruin the rice economy within a centralized model that is now trying to stimulate rice harvesting in small plots under Vietnamese advice.
According to official statistics, in the last six years, rice production in Cuba has decreased by 90%, which has forced it to agree to imports from Vietnam, Brazil, and Uruguay.
Rice is the most important cereal in the global South: it is the staple food for more than half of the world’s population. Cuba is among the nations with a high consumption of the grain, with almost 70 kg per capita per year.
Meanwhile, the so-called basic food basket, which for decades was a redistributive mechanism that provided coherence to the social contract, is another of the State’s obligations that has already become unbearable to sustain.
The transition to a model where the market and rent-seeking maximization would have the last word seems to be imposed, hand in hand with dollarization (no longer a traveling companion), to the same extent that the State has been canceling, given its lack of liquidity and readjustment of priorities, old welfare loyalties that at one time earned it social consensus.
Last December, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero announced to parliament that the ration book, created in 1962, had its days numbered and that people and not products would be subsidized, in an irreversible process.
“This impacts the budget, we are looking for mechanisms and we will implement it little by little, product by product, but it is a path that has no turning back,” said Marrero, but when 2025 came, the government backed down and gave guarantees that it would remain in force, at least this year.
The productivity crisis and the prevailing decapitalization in the fields of Cuba, where investments have lagged far behind those captured by the hotel and real estate sector, do not seem to find a point of return.
For Doctor in Economic Sciences Pedro Monreal, “the agricultural ruin is the most alarming component of the structural crisis in Cuba, the most resounding failure of the government’s economic policy, a crucial factor in mass impoverishment and the breeding ground for political unrest.”
The Vietnamese clue
“This rice is Vietnamese,” the shopkeeper reluctantly answers the question of a user who has happily come to pick up his reduced December ration. “Two pounds and be happy you’re getting that,” says the employee, between sarcasm and condescension.
Many Cubans hope that the lands given to Vietnamese entrepreneurs, traditionally a donor of the cereal to the island, will allow a gap to be opened for good yields in the crop and that the management model will reach other parts of the island.
The experience is unprecedented in socialist Cuba. The initial agreement includes the allocation of 308 hectares to a Vietnamese company in the province of Pinar del Río, for three years, with plans to expand to 5,000 hectares.
The Indochinese, who has become one of the world’s rice export champions, with more than 4 billion dollars in 2023, will be in charge of managing all the processes, hiring Cuban labor, and providing resources such as fertilizers and herbicides.
“We really have to give more applicability to the issue of food security, but I wonder why land has been given for three years to a Vietnamese company…and you cannot give a national the same conditions; because the national can also look for fresh resources with a family member or with entities abroad,” questioned Doctor of Economic Sciences Omar Everleny.
“What I am saying is that we must give the same treatment to national capital as to foreign capital if you are going to make a coherent policy, which is what this country needs and there is hardly any time left,” demanded the expert.
300 million dollars and the national dish has become a gastronomic exception
A recent visit by Vice President Salvador Valdés Mesa to Pinar del Río checked the local rice program and uncovered alarming figures.
The Cuban State spends more than 300 million dollars annually on the import of rice for the rationed family food basket, clearly fragmented and insufficient, under the pressure of a national demand that exceeds 600,000 tons.
According to Valdés Mesa, last year the country bought 407,000 tons of the grain in the international markets, which behaves like a financial drain.
“In the foods that we import, the largest amount is rice, it is what we spend the most on every month. There is no other that surpasses it, neither wheat nor cooking oil, and that volume of dollars that is spent is needed to buy supplies and fuel,” explained the almost 80-year-old politician who does not spare exhortations in his pilgrimages through the agricultural plans of the island.
“The greatest incentive to plant rice is that in Cuba people eat rice,” he said, praising the cereal as the faithful companion of many foods in the national diet, in which the well-known rice with beans was a daily staple that the crisis has brought back to us as an exception.
The government’s aim is to guarantee that 80% of the rice consumed in the country is locally produced. For now, it seems like a pipe dream. Sine die.
