MIAMI, United States. — Official figures on the retail sales in Cuba in 2022 They have generated concern among Cuban economists, who describe the data published by the regime as “disastrous.”
One of the experts who addressed the issue was Pedro Monreal, who assures that the statistics contradict the authorities’ version of a supposed economic recovery.
“The official data on retail sales in Cuba that could be devastating with respect to any vision of an alleged economic recovery underway. The nominal data is not good, but when adjusted for inflation it is disastrous,” said Monreal, who opened a thread on Twitter to analyze the situation of prices and inflation in the Caribbean country.
The economist’s analysis is based on figures released by the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI). In the specific case of food sales by state and private economic actors, the numbers indicate that these represented approximately 38% of the total sales of goods in Cuba in 2022.
According to Monreal, “retail sales are considered material support for consumer demand that could be associated with income such as salaries and pensions.” In this sense, he specified that “an annual drop in two-thirds of ‘real’ food retail sales is no small matter.”
The economist also argued that “the enormous contraction in ‘real’ terms of food retail sales in 2022 reveals an important dimension of the brutal ‘adjustment’ of consumption and aggregate purchasing power in Cuba.”
In his analysis, Monreal indicated that the cost of the adjustment was concentrated in workers and retirees, the latter group being one of the most vulnerable to the high prices of products.
Monreal also revealed that the so-called “compression” of aggregate purchasing power that appears in the latest retail trade data “is compatible with the relative ‘compression’ of the weight of wages in GDP”, something that, according to the expert, is already It had been going on since before.
