“I didn’t even notice when I got paid”
By Amado Viera
HAVANA TIMES – Each month, Yunaika sets aside between 200 and 300 pesos (around 50 cents in US dollars) to contribute to small collections organized at the school where her nine-year-old son studies.
The most recent one, in February, aimed to buy a new lock for the boy’s classroom and pay a carpenter to install it and fix the door. Earlier collections had been used to purchase new lights for the room, cleaning supplies, and to repair chairs and desks.
Many years ago, the Cuban government stopped taking responsibility for those small improvements, which became the responsibility of the students’ families. Some schools still have a caretaker to handle maintenance, but even in those cases the materials they work with must be provided by the parents, who also often give them payments or gifts as a form of encouragement.
That was the case at Yunaika’s son’s school, where a retired man was in charge of everyday repairs. “But he quit to go work somewhere else. I don’t think it surprised anyone. According to the principal he was earning only 2,900 pesos (under six dollars) a month.”
Low wages are also the reason the school has no janitor. And it does not look like it will have one in the near future. “As an alternative, several parents want to collect money to pay ‘under the table’ one or two women to keep the bathrooms and other common areas in good condition. We estimate it wouldn’t be more than 50 pesos per parent per month, but the improvement would be noticeable right away,” Yunaika said.
Those expenses are minor compared with what several of her friends have had to spend—some have even given gifts to their children’s teachers so they would not quit in the middle of the school year. “Luckily, my son’s teacher is one of those old-school teachers with an incredible work ethic. But honestly, I don’t know how she manages to live on the 5,000-plus pesos (about ten dollars) she earns.”
Better to Have Your Own Little Business
Yunaika studied nursing and practiced it for a decade. During that time she specialized in pediatric care, a field she says she enjoyed. But in 2024 she left her job to sell clothing and other items that her sister-in-law sends her from Mexico. On a good day she can earn the 7,000 pesos (14 dollars) that previously took her an entire month to accumulate on her payroll—without the exhaustion of night shifts and the other demands of her former profession.
Many of her former colleagues at the Pediatric Hospital in the city of Camagüey have also quit. A couple of them left the country, but most have found jobs in private businesses, which usually pay higher wages than the state.
Cuba closed 2025 with an average monthly salary of 6,685 pesos ($13 USD) in the state budgeted sector and 7,590 pesos for workers in state companies. Meanwhile the minimum wage remained at the 2,100 pesos (4 USD) per month established during the “design” of the Tarea Ordenamiento reforms in January 2021.
Depending on paychecks equivalent to 10 or 15 dollars a month, nearly all state workers—who make up two-thirds of the labor force—face enormous challenges just to survive. Especially since their incomes have stopped growing while prices have remained firmly on an inflationary path. According to the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), during 2024 the average state salary increased by 15 percent. But in 2025 it rose only 2.8 percent. By contrast, the cost of the basic food basket increased by 18 percent in 2024 and presumably much more in 2025, a year for which ONEI has not yet published official statistics.
Every March, economist Omar Everleny Perez prepares for the digital magazine La Joven Cuba a family budget that includes a detailed breakdown of the basic food basket with the prices recorded at the end of the previous year. The analysis corresponding to 2025 has not yet been released, but the 2024 report—presented last March—already portrayed an extreme situation: the essential foods needed to sustain two people amounted to 24,351 pesos per month, nearly four times the average salary paid at that time by state institutions and three and a half times that paid by state companies.
The crisis worsened during 2025 and today has become unsustainable for a large share of families. Even though salaries have grown little or not at all, in the past year foods such as oil and rice have doubled in price, chicken and wheat flour have increased by more than 50 percent, and eggs by 30 percent. In recent weeks that trend has been reinforced by the oil blockade ordered against the island by President Donald Trump.
Many private business owners also take advantage of low state wages to keep their employees’ pay at the lowest possible levels. Outside Havana, wages for low-skill jobs such as clerks and assistants rarely exceed 1,500 pesos ($3 USD) for each workday of twelve hours or more. The new Labor Code not only condones this situation but will authorize workdays of up to thirteen continuous hours, the longest in all of Latin America and the Caribbean.
The feeling of being exploited by both the state and private employers has led many people to abandon their search for jobs. In July 2025 the National Employment Survey revealed that only 49.1 percent of Cubans of working age are employed. Among the rest, most neither work nor seek employment. The proportion of employed people on the island is about 10 percent below the Latin American average, ONEI warned. It also highlighted the high degree of aging within the workforce, whose average age is around 44.
“Many people say, ‘If they’re going to exploit me, I might as well start some little business of my own.’ At least that’s what I thought when I realized I couldn’t keep living on the misery they paid me as a nurse and I decided to start something on my own,” Yunaika explained. “Sometimes I owed so much that I didn’t even notice when I got paid.”
Several young people consulted for this article partly agreed with her. Since the 1990s, a segment of the Cuban population has lived without a stable job thanks to family remittances and the informal economy. “With 200 dollars sent to you each month, you already have more than 100,000 pesos in your hands—enough to live without worries,” reasoned a 19-year-old who is waiting for his mother to complete the immigration paperwork that will allow him to travel to Germany to reunite with her.
Meanwhile, thanks to the expansion of internet access through mobile data since 2018, the number of people working in the digital sphere—especially women—has grown exponentially. Job groups on Facebook, the most popular social network on the island, are full of offers to work as sales managers. They are the last link in long chains of intermediaries who market everything from imported products to goods of dubious origin (the “struggle,” or detouring of resources at workplaces, is a practice as widespread as it is socially accepted). “First-hand items. We are a great opportunity for mothers with small children and caregivers of the sick,” read a sales job offer posted on Facebook this week.
“Almost No One Makes Ends Meet”
Until early February Eduardo worked in the construction of the new cement factory in Nuevitas as a crane-truck operator. He spent nearly two years on that project until the oil blockade forced the near-complete halt of the work, where he had been earning the highest wages of his entire career. “In a ‘slow’ month I would come back to Camagüey with 30,000 or 35,000 pesos,” he recalled.
However, more money on the payroll did not mean greater real income. Eduardo and his coworkers had long been asking their company to restore the systems of “worker benefits,” which in the past guaranteed the delivery of packages containing food and toiletries, clothing, appliances, and even housing. That was how Eduardo managed to obtain his own home.
Shortly before the pandemic the government decided to cancel those systems as part of a process of “eliminating undue subsidies.” The decision reduced expenses but affected thousands of state workers. “In a country like Cuba, where shortages are constant and prices rise every day, it’s better to have the product than the money. Before, you worked knowing you would get your jaba [bag with various goods]; now you spend the whole time wondering how much prices will have risen by the end of the month. Under those circumstances, almost no one makes ends meet. It doesn’t matter how much you earn,” Eduardo lamented.
In theory, both he and the rest of the Cuban population enjoy numerous labor rights, which are supposedly to be expanded after the approval of the new Labor Code in July. In practice, however, that is not the case; and even being a highly qualified professional does not guarantee that one can make a living from daily work.
Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.