The announced Government Program which is now being debated in institutional segments exhibits a significant failure in normalizing the decoupling between the growing cost of the basic basket of reference goods and services (CBSR) and salaries. This structural distortion, far from being resolved, is hidden under official rhetoric and translates into a variant of shock therapy that postpones immediate and transparent solutions.
It is about the “hiding of the ‘damned’ data on the official cost of the basket”, describe the economist and university professor Pedro Monreal in an analytical comment that appeared this week on the Substack platform.
Six points about the Government Program and a mandatory mention
Independent estimates of the cost of CBSR. Distance with official data
In the text, Monreal cites the Cuban academic Javier Pérez Capdevila, who has estimated the current monthly value of the basket of reference goods and services (CBSR) per person at approximately 50,157 pesos (CUP).
The calculation, which includes a food expense of 37,590 pesos per month, has been an approximate exercise based on his personal experience in Guantanamo, the city where this scientist, internationally recognized for his contributions to “fuzzy mathematics” and its application in economics, accounting and the management of science and knowledge, was born.
The calculation made by Pérez Capdevila is added to measurements such as those made by the Cuban economist Omar Everleny of 45,401 CUP per month for two people in December 2024 (including 24,351 CUP in food) and the estimate by the Food Monitor Program (an independent observatory that measures food insecurity in Cuba) of a value of 41,735 CUP of the basic food basket for two people in Havana in August 2025.
According to Dr. Monreal’s analysis, without taking into consideration the different quantifications and methods used for the calculations, such estimates share two characteristics: “first, they are considerably distant from the latest official CBSR data reported in October 2021 (3,250 CUP per month per person) and for which no further updates have been disclosed, and second, they are much lower than the most recent data on the average monthly state salary of 6,685.3 CUP. (January-September 2025).
For the expert, the ostensible distance between the estimates of the cost of the basic basket of reference goods and services (CBSR) and state salaries seems to be the key to understanding the persistent official silence around updating its value.
An update that has not yet arrived
During the presentation of the government “projections” for 2024, in December 2023, the Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero, assured that work was being done on updating the cost of the CBSR. However, since then the topic has disappeared from public discourse, without new details or official data.
For Monreal, this is not a minor omission: the publication of an official CBSR value that was close to independent estimates—or even slightly lower—would call into question the political narrative of a successful or at least viable economic model, becoming a symbolic blow against that central promise of the government project.
“It would be a kind of nail in the coffin of the political promise of a prosperous and sustainable socialism,” considered Monreal, a resident of Madrid and an active observer of the economic dynamics on the island.
According to the economist, in 2020, during the intense communication campaign about the restructuring and monetary unification process called Ordering Taskthe cost of the basic basket was targeted, since it was presented as “a statistical pillar of one of the four crucial components of the ‘Regulation’: the transformation of the population’s income.”
More than 24 thousand pesos a month for basic food for two people, calculates Cuban economist
Official calculations, realities not considered
The official procedure to calculate the “design” value of the basic basket of reference goods and services (CBSR) was explained in detail at the beginning of the so-called “Ordinance”, on January 1, 2021.
According to estimates, this cost was 1,528 CUP per capita monthly, a figure that became the statistical support for the entire reform.
From this calculation, the minimum wage was determined at 2,100 CUP, the result of multiplying the cost of the CBSR by a coefficient of 1.3. “The minimum wage was conceived as the base floor of the new salary scale of the system,” Monreal highlighted in his analysis.
This minimum income was not only intended to guarantee a level that avoided—or at least reduced—poverty, but also served as a reference to structure the salary pyramid. In theory, income should be aligned with factors such as qualifications, level of responsibility and job conditions.
The minimum wage also functioned as a parameter for other social income. “It was used as a reference for pensions, job guarantees in case of interruptions and to set the threshold for social assistance,” explained Monreal, underlining that the initial design sought to give coherence to the entire benefits system.
For the Cuban academic, “that network of variables and desired effects between them on which the ‘design’ of the program was based collapsed precisely when one of its statistical pillars, the cost of the CBSR, was dissociated – due to inflation – in an abrupt and notable manner with respect to the value that, according to the ‘design’, important variables such as the minimum wage, salaries and pensions should have.”
The design failure caused an adjustment on the income side that radically and quickly reversed the “planned” operation of the economic system’s incentives: income from work ceased to be the main component of family well-being, unraveled Monreal, who in the early 1990s was a visiting professor at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, based at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, United States.
