With a basic salary of 2,100 Cuban pesos and a Christmas dinner that can exceed 7,000 CUP, many Cubans would need between three and four monthly salaries to maintain the Christmas Eve tradition.
MADRID, Spain.- Celebrating Christmas Eve with a traditional dinner is again, this December 24, 2025, a luxury out of reach of most Cubans. The combination of insufficient salaries, sustained inflation, food shortages and prolonged blackouts has turned emblematic dishes such as roast suckling pig, congrí or yucca with mojo into practically unattainable options for large sectors of the population.
In state and MSME markets, prices of basic products needed for a Christmas dinner have skyrocketed even further in the weeks leading up to the holidays. Pork, the central element of the Cuban Christmas table, is sold between 1,150 and 1,300 Cuban pesos (CUP) per pound in the case of the loin or leg, while cheaper options, such as picadillo, are around 320 CUP per pound. Chicken, another common alternative in the absence of pork, reaches prices of 4,500 to 5,100 CUP for two-kilogram packages, figures that far exceed the monthly income of many households.
Traditional companions do not escape the price escalation either. Imported rice sells between 690 and 840 CUP per kilogram, black beans can cost more than 800 CUP per 500 grams. In agricultural markets, cassava is around 60 CUP per pound, tomato is around 150 CUP, and lettuce is around 100 CUP per pound.
This panorama contrasts markedly with state salaries, which are located, the basic one around 2,100 pesos and the average around 5,000 Cuban pesos per month, a figure that is not enough to cover even a significant part of the total cost of a basic Christmas dinner for an average family.
With these prices, a minimum Christmas dinner for a Cuban family can cost between 6,700 and almost 8,000 pesos, not including drinks or desserts. If the basic monthly salary of 2,100 Cuban pesos is taken as a reference, a worker would need between three and almost four full salaries to be able to afford just the Christmas Eve dinner, allocating all of their income to a single meal.
Faced with this reality, for some families, the luckiest ones, the only way to maintain the tradition has been to resort to help from outside. Food delivery platforms from outside Cuba offer Christmas dinner combos with pork or chicken, rice, food and drinks, whose prices range between 80 and 130 dollars or euros, depending on the number of diners. To the change of the informal market —where the dollar is around 440 CUP and the euro is around 480 CUP—, these dinners are equivalent to between 40,000 and more than 60,000 Cuban pesos, that is, the full salary of several months of work for an average worker on the Island.
Added to this economic difficulty is the energy crisis, which maintains blackouts of up to 20 hours a day in several provinces, affecting the conservation and preparation of food right around the holidays. For many households, even when they manage to gather some of the ingredients, cooking Christmas Eve dinner becomes an additional challenge.
Thus, Christmas 2025 once again reflects the depth of the economic crisis that the country is going through: a celebration marked by inequality, where the possibility of sitting at the table with traditional dishes depends, to a large extent, on family remittances or shipments paid from abroad, while for a considerable part of the population Christmas dinner will be, once again, non-existent or deeply limited
