Cooking Oil in Cuba is Now a Total Luxury Item
A liter now costs more than a monthly minimum wage
Despite the high price, some taxi drivers are using it in diesel vehicles when they can’t find fuel.
By Juan Diego Rodriguez (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES — Two bottles of sunflower oil, sitting on top of plastic crates on a Havana sidewalk this Wednesday, summed up much of Cuba’s current crisis. The street vendor was asking 4,500 pesos for each bottle, alongside canned goods, packages of spaghetti, and packs of cigarettes. The price, verified by 14ymedio, has turned one of the most basic ingredients in Cuban cooking into a luxury item.
To buy that one-liter bottle, a worker earning the monthly minimum wage, set at 3,210 pesos, would have to hand over the equivalent of one and a half months’ salary. At Wednesday’s informal exchange rate, the bottle costs about US $6.67 or €5.70.
The currency conversion, however, barely conveys the magnitude of the gap. In Spain, where incomes are far higher, a liter of refined sunflower oil sells for between €1.75 and €2.85 at supermarket chains such as Dia and Carrefour. For a Cuban living on a minimum wage, by contrast, the price observed in Havana represents around 45 days of work.
The 4,500-peso price verified by this newspaper is not even the highest being charged. Social media listings advertise bottles for as much as 6,000 pesos, illustrating just how far speculation has driven up the cost of a product that until recently was subject to a maximum retail price of 990 pesos per liter.
The government removed that price cap in July after it led to shortages, black-market sales, and an ever-widening gap between official prices and the real cost of imports. Without enough supply to meet demand, the administrative ceiling ended up driving cooking oil out of regulated stores without lowering its price on the informal market.
Some local governments are now trying to contain the situation through inspections and “agreed-upon prices.” The Municipal Administration Council in Guantanamo, for example, has set the retail price of a bottle of cooking oil at 2,200 pesos after reviewing the costs declared by local merchants. But without an increase in supply, such measures risk repeating the failure of previous price controls.
Demand from household kitchens has also been joined by another, more unusual one that underscores Cuba’s energy crisis. Videos posted on social media show drivers pouring vegetable oil into the fuel tanks of diesel-powered vehicles as a desperate alternative amid chronic fuel shortages.
The practice is technically possible in certain older diesel engines and may keep them running temporarily, but it carries significant risks. Cooking oil is not biodiesel, and its higher viscosity can clog fuel injectors, leave deposits, and ultimately damage the engine’s fuel system.
In today’s Cuba, marked by rolling blackouts and empty gas stations, the liter of oil a family needs to fry an egg now competes with the liter a driver pours into a fuel tank to complete a trip. On that makeshift display along a Havana sidewalk, the yellow bottles captured the scale of the country’s disaster. A basic food staple has also become an emergency fuel—and a commodity whose price reaches one and a half monthly minimum wages.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in Spanish by Havana Times.