San José de Las Lajas (Mayabeque)/The white lights of the La Época market, in San José de las Lajas, Mayabeque, make the rows of eggs stacked on the counter shine. The clients who arrive observe, calculate. Someone asks the price, another complains and a third decides to take five cartons, with 30 units each. “I don’t know where people get the dollars from, but they take them in quantity,” confesses an employee of one of the two state stores in the municipality that sell their products in US currency.
The price – $5.25 per carton – is equivalent to about 2,572 pesos, according to the informal exchange rate reported daily by The Touch. If payment is in cash, customers must hand over six dollars and receive the change in candy. “Since I don’t have a Classic card, I have no choice,” protests Tamara, a retiree who has brought a small plastic container to protect the eggs.
“These days in San José it is a luxury to eat an egg, not only because of the price, but because there are none anywhere.” Your purchase, which you will share with a friend, counts 14ymediowill allow you to have lunch for a few days. “The cost is equivalent to more than a third of my pension. You can’t buy five or six units, you have to take the entire carton.”
“The cost is equivalent to more than a third of my pension. You can’t buy five or six units, you have to take the entire carton”
The images inside the market, managed by the official Tiendas Caribe chain, speak for themselves: shelves full of wine, mayonnaise, imported cookies and eggs with commercial licenses in English and Portuguese. On the boxes you can read the origin: Brazil. The promised “food sovereignty” has not yet arrived and the data reveal that Cuba has had to import more and more of this product, mainly from the Dominican Republic and Brazil.
Last August, the official newspaper Workers He described the current situation as the worst in 60 years, pointing out that in just three decades Cuba went from producing 2,717 million eggs in 1991 to only 385 million in 2024. Traditionally producing provinces, such as Mayabeque, have lost more than 60% of their volumes. Poultry farms, affected by a lack of feed and constant electrical interruptions, are barely able to sustain a portion of domestic consumption.
“Sometimes it can’t even be solved with money, because the shortage is total,” says Vladimir, a neighbor who pays in dollars thanks to the help of his emigrated sister. “The refrigerators spend most of the month empty and the stores in MLC (freely convertible currency) are worse,” acknowledges the farmer.
In the Cuban diet, the egg has become the emergency animal protein: it replaces pork, chicken and fish
In the Cuban diet, the egg has become the emergency animal protein: it replaces pork, chicken and fish, all with prices that are increasing, in a country where this October a pound of pork steak reached 1,000 pesos. But eggs are not cheap either: today a carton of 30 units costs almost half of the average monthly salary—about 6,500 pesos—a proportion that illustrates the crisis without the need for additional figures. “Cartons of eggs are selling on the street for up to 3,000 pesos, but that’s when you find them,” says Vladimir.
In the halls of the La Época market there is a mixture of resignation and routine. Nobody argues, nobody smiles. Each customer carries their cardboard as if they were carrying something fragile and valuable, a relic that will soon disappear. Outside, the heat hits the sidewalk, but inside the air conditioning continues to hum over the well-lit shelves. For a few minutes, before the eyes of those who arrive and see the piles of the in-demand product, the shortage seems to have been suspended. Then someone asks if there will be eggs next week, and the employee responds without looking up: “No one knows that.”
