HAVANA – Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Sista Cabrera, 71, has lunch at a charity dining hall organized by the Catholic Church of San Francisco el Nuevo, in Havana’s historic center. It is one of many soup kitchens helping to alleviate hunger in Cuba as the food crisis has worsened this year.
“This project is quite good,” Cabrera told IPS as she waited hungrily for her portion of food, holding a deep container in her hand.
The initiative, called La Hermana Cazuela (Sister Cooking Pot), has been providing these lunches since June, funded mainly by donations from Cubans living abroad, along with other forms of support from the Catholic Church.
“The idea is above all to accompany homeless people and highly vulnerable older adults,” journalist Maykel Gonzalez, who has coordinated the project since February, told IPS. Initially, the initiative distributed breakfasts.
The renewed solidarity effort comes just as hardship has begun to engulf virtually every aspect of Cuban society with even greater force, following the US oil blockade and financial sanctions that ultimately brought the Caribbean nation’s economy and the state’s social protection programs to the brink of collapse.
“There were many people going without food, some of whom were eating out of the garbage, and we decided to do something to help them,” Betzabé Bertot, a project volunteer and member of the Catholic parish, told IPS.
Limited Solutions
Cabrera, one of the project’s 70 beneficiaries, could never have imagined years ago that she would depend on charity to survive. Since the late 1990s, she had run a little cafeteria that provided her with enough income to help others.
“I was always someone who lived well. It’s very bad to be attached to money, but right now money means health. When I have money, nothing hurts,” said Cabrera, who now has diabetes and receives the limited social security assistance.
In 2019, a partial building collapse destroyed half her apartment and wiped out her source of income.
“I still live in that collapsed building,” she said.
In 2022, as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to come under control, Cabrera tried to reopen her business, but the authorities would not allow it because her building was at risk of collapse and awaiting demolition, even though many residents, including her, continue to live there.
Living alone and responsible for 15 cats, Cabrera had no choice but to walk the streets and turn to soup kitchens to survive.
“There are days when I have no food and go without eating anything, except maybe a piece of bread. My day-to-day life is desperate, terribly stressful,” she said.
The former small businesswoman now alternates between lunches provided by the Catholic initiative, state-run social dining halls, and occasionally evangelical churches, at a time when religious institutions are expanding their efforts to support the most vulnerable.
Food problems are growing, and so is the number of people in need. As a result, she spends much of the day walking around in search of something to eat, although she has not yet had to resort to eating leftovers from the garbage, as some others have.
“At least I still have something of a home,” Cabrera said.
According to Bertot, the volunteer at the Franciscan church, the hardest part is that there is not enough food for everyone in need.
“We have to set limits. Telling a hungry person that we can’t give them anything is the hardest part for us,” she said.
For Gonzalez, the project coordinator, who is a practicing Pentecostal rather than a Catholic, this is unavoidable.
“The solutions that individuals or small groups can offer will always be very limited. I will never have enough food here to feed everyone who comes to the church door,” he said.
Social Protection Centers in Decline
For the past two years, Cabrera has also been enrolled in a dining hall in the city’s historic center that belongs to the state-run Family Assistance System (SAF).
The SAF was created 30 years ago during Cuba’s economic crisis of the 1990s, following the collapse of the socialist bloc and the Soviet Union.
Today, the system operates more than 4,400 food service facilities and provides three state-subsidized meals a day to more than 66,000 economically vulnerable people, usually at a cost of less than the equivalent of one US cent per serving.
With the nearly five dollars a month she receives from social security—one dollar of which goes toward paying for SAF meals—Cabrera can barely afford anything in a market where a single liter of vegetable oil can consume her entire monthly income.
SAF meals have always been criticized for their nutritional quality and taste, but they were practically a godsend compared with 2026, when the crisis took a heavy toll on social protection centers.
“White rice and broth—that’s all there is. Nothing else. This problem started in 2026. In 2025, the food was a little better and better prepared,” Cabrera said.
Even so, she makes an effort not to miss more than three days at her SAF dining hall, because otherwise she would be removed from the list and replaced by other vulnerable applicants waiting for an opening in the system to improve their situation.
One of these centers, on Monte Street in central Havana, feeds 269 people daily, according to its financial administrator, Lazara Rosell, who told IPS that the number has increased compared with 2025.
On Tuesday the 13th, there was considerable excitement at the dining hall because the staff had managed to obtain some beans for lunch. Otherwise, the meal would have consisted only of bread, rice, and broth, as it does most days.
According to Rosell, beans are no longer common, as they were in 2025, although they are not as rare as “protein,” which usually consists of some type of processed meat that arrives approximately every two weeks. In 2025, it was served every day.
Chicken, the employee recalled, has been served only once in all of 2026.
“We want food to come in and for them to help us more, but because of the US blockade, nothing gets in. There are many ships outside Cuba that want to come in and bring food, but that son of a bitch [referring to US President Donald Trump] won’t allow it,” said Felix Villar, a retiree and former city bus driver.
Sanctions Affect Cubans’ Diets
Two executive orders signed by Trump on January 29 and May 1 blocked fuel shipments and threatened foreign investors, respectively.
These measures led in May to the suspension of operations by the two largest shipping companies transporting supplies to Cuba, France’s CMA CGM and Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd, among other foreign companies in various sectors that severed ties with Cuba.
As a result, more than 7,000 containers of food, medicine, solar power systems, and other essential goods are currently being held at Caribbean ports, according to repeated statements by the Cuban government.
Among them are dozens of containers of humanitarian aid purchased by United Nations agencies operating in Cuba.
“It’s no secret that since the beginning of this year, we’ve been facing one challenge after another, and they change with each new sanction. We have to adapt… many companies don’t want to take any risks because the sanctions now target third parties,” Etienne Labande, representative of the World Food Programme (WFP) in Cuba, told IPS.
According to Labande, the problem, at least for the United Nations, was “partially resolved” because CMA CGM resumed voyages to Cuba, but only to transport food and medical supplies.
The United Nations was able to negotiate the onward shipment of hundreds of tons of food that had been stranded in Kingston, Jamaica, he added. However, during the three months the supplies were held up, the lack of import routes forced the organization to suspend submissions for new food purchases.
Since September 30, the United States has imposed financial restrictions that also target the private sector, making imports of these vital supplies even more difficult in a country that for years has imported more than 80% of the food consumed by its 9.4 million inhabitants.
Agricultural activity in 2026 has fallen to new lows because of shortages of fuel and other necessary inputs.
The WFP, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and other agencies support Cuban farmers through donations of equipment, training, and professional advice to help local producers establish sustainable food systems. At the same time, they provide food assistance to social protection programs such as the SAF.
“The idea is really for local food producers in the countryside to be able to establish a system that frees them from dependence on imports, without relying on anyone else,” Labande said.
On Monday October 12th, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel denounced the impact of US economic sanctions on food production and distribution on the island during the World Food Forum, organized annually by the FAO.
“There is food on the streets. The problem is the prices, because wages don’t keep up with them. One bottle of oil wiped out my 4,000-peso pension [about five dollars],” said Villar, who eats at the SAF dining hall on Monte Street.
Inflation, which had been slowing in recent years, began accelerating again in the second quarter of this year and has reached worrying levels in recent months.
At the end of September, year-on-year inflation had climbed to 28.44%, according to the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), while food and nonalcoholic beverages registered a year-on-year increase of 42.66%.
This is particularly troubling given that the average state-sector wage in Cuba, earned by 68.5% of the country’s 4.1 million employed people, amounts to just over nine dollars a month.
Poverty and Hunger
A study published in September by sociologist Mayra Espina, a specialist in poverty and inequality, estimated that 66% of Cuba’s population now lives in economic poverty, with incomes insufficient to cover the approximately 14 dollars a month needed for a basic foods.
In September 2025, Espina told IPS that the figure stood between 40% and 45%.
The updated estimate takes into account the one-third of Cuba’s population that, according to the research, receives remittances, as well as the 1.6 million people working in the private sector, where wages are far higher than the national average.
The study also identifies 1,365,000 people in vulnerable situations, compared with the 876,000 Cubans officially recognized as vulnerable by the Cuban government during the July 29 parliamentary session.
The government’s official figure, which is still being updated, was obtained using a methodology developed jointly with the World Food Program that employs food security indicators to identify vulnerable people, Labande said.
“Food security exists when people have access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food for their growth, development, and an active, healthy life,” according to the WFP’s official definition.
According to the latest Global Report on Food Crises, 266 million people faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 47 countries and territories during 2025.
In June, the WFP approved more than $116 million to support Cuba through 2030 in its efforts to ensure food security for its population.
“We know there is a food security problem in the country because of the difficulty of accessing food in almost every part of the country,” Labande said.
First published in Spanish by IPS and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.