100% PROFIT

Right after the two hurricanes that pummeled Cuba some weeks back, a big hullabaloo began with respect to helping the people on the island. Some folks wanted the remittance restrictions lifted and more money sent directly to family and friends and some folks wanted to try to force the Cuban government to allow humanitarian aid to go directly to Cubans and other organizations, and then there were many opinions lying somewhere in between these two. We on the outside argued and debated for days on end, and, we could probably keep up the debate for quite some time, but, in the long run, as always, the castro regime is the winner and the Cuban people the losers.

That's how dictators stay in power.

I preface the following - writtien by a Canadian journalist behind a pen name - with the above simply to make a point: no matter what your stance on hurricane assistance is, the Cuban government will always take advantage of people's benevolence and humanity by turning a profit.

September 2008, Havana after the Hurricanes

Let me tell you this story, because even my good friends in Havana, though in general agreement with my observations, cannot see with my eyes.

As a person of privilege (a tourist) for 14 years in Havana, I am familiar with the shopping. My friends work hard all day, and so I pound the pavements of the city waiting for them to return home in the evening. (When you live somewhere, your eyes become accustomed to things and change is not so noticeable; also, where I have had the privilege of going into the dollar stores as well as the peso shops, most of my friends never enter the dollar premises as they do not have dollars, now known as CUCs). So that is my background; thousands of hours walking the streets of Havana, checking out life and looking into shops to see what I can find.

The biggest supermarket in Havana is Supermercado 70 in Miramar. This is handily located in the region of the consulates for people with lots of dough. I normally visit it only a few times a year but each time I cruise each and every aisle carefully, looking for rare commodities such as habanero hot chili sauce to give friends! Sometimes I am successful.

By the way, I can tell you that the prices charged in CUCs for *every item from food to electronics*, etc. is double or even triple the price you would pay for the same product in America.

I was also on very familiar terms with the big Plaza Carlos III "shopping mall" and all of its shops; with Fin de Siglo and with Epoca, as well as the dollar shops near tourist hotels. I was always on the hunt for useful items at a good price. If I found such a thing, I snapped it up immediately because chances are it would never be seen again!

So I arrived this trip with the usual things in mind; make the rounds and pray for Jello at least! Or maybe some decent melamine from China.

But this trip turned out to be different because I was staying for the first time in Miramar. The hotel was close to the Supermercado 70 and it was also near a main stop for the 40 centavo bus. So it was perfect.

My first morning I lined up at the Supermercado. As the doors opened at 9.30, my eyes widened at what they saw. Not three months ago I had been here. But change was afoot; as you enter there is now a “hardware”
section with all the latest from China, things that were never previously available in Cuba, for home repair. The entire first aisle was filled with the latest coloured toilets and sinks, with cans of paint and bags of drywall and the things you need to build a home, all things that I had never before seen at Supermercado 70!

I think it was the bathroom fixtures that first aroused my suspicions, but I laid them temporarily to rest before venturing further. My Havana friends had warned me that the markets were “pretty well empty of produce” but they were referring to the national peso markets. What I saw now almost defied description; at least it defied any past description of Supermercado 70. The freezers were bursting with meats; enormous legs of pork, ground beef by the hundreds, chicken by the thousand, and then the deli counter was also overstuffed; every kind of deli meat, dried salamis, chorizos, huge roast beefs. I wished I had the money to buy some of this for my friends but the prices were high.

Then I began my ritual cruising of each aisle. Again my eyes were torn open. There were products here that I had never seen nor even dreamed about. Whoa, how many thousand packages of juices from so many European and South American sources? And the packaged goods! Dios mio, I could not count the tremendous assortment of “Made in USA” packages of what I would call “junk food” that appeared to be of a “no-name” brand. I think that the brand was “White Rose”, very cheap packaging. There was cake mix, icing mix, pancake mix, plus enormous jars of pancake sauce to go with it. And God help us, gigantic bottles of Chocolate Sauce and Caramel Sauce….for what purpose?! There were so many thousands of boxes and cartons of biscuits from around the world. Also dried beans of every description. My head was truly beginning to spin.

Could it be a coincidence that the Cuban Government at just this very moment had begun to import so many new products from around the world?

And most of them were products that have a long shelf life?. For example, when I got to the milk shelf, I could not believe it. In 14 years it has always been a struggle to get hold of powdered or long-life milk even at the /Supermercado/ which can run out. Yet here was as much milk products as in an American supermarket!
When I got to the saltines, I saw that there were hundreds of large boxes from Mexico and decided that would be a good brand for my friends.

So I bought a few. I was quite surprised to see that the Cuban Government is now so concerned about the health of its people that it is also importing “low-cal”, “no-cal”, and even “no-gluten” products! How amazing that in just a few months since my last visit, so much has been done for those who can afford to shop CUC!

Well, by the end of that first visit, my suspicions were on high. But over the next few weeks as I re-visited the market, they exploded. For example, on the third day I returned to get another box of the Mexican saltines (which had taken up almost an entire aisle) and saw that they were completely sold out (!!) but that they had been replaced by American saltines. (!!) You tell me! What the hell……….!!

When I visited friends that night and regaled them with my adventures at Supermercado, they said that they had heard rumours but that the Government had announced on the nightly newscast that they had “purchased large quantities of food to help hurricane victims” . Well, over the next two weeks I would visit dozens of more of my regular shops in Havana City and find many of the same new products for sale. But Supermercado 70 definitely takes the cake for sheer volume, numbers and unbelievable turnover compared with in the past! Every day that I went there were skids of product clogging the aisles as they restocked and restocked.

Now to hit the rest of the favourites! /Fin de Siglo/ had been gutted and turned into a tourist trap. It was for a long time a “second-hand clothing depot” which used to receive the cast-offs from the /Goodwill/ stores in Canada. Now they have turned it into a place for Cuban artisans to sell their crafts, much like the market in Old Havana. This shop held little interest and had not changed.

Then I walked over to Epoca, which had been undergoing reconstruction in May. By some kind of a miracle this renovation had been completed (surely in record time?!) and inside was a sight that set me back on my feet. The escalator in the centre of the store was….working! People were riding up, up and away! What a sight, after having always seen this dead albatross. As I stepped aboard and went up I saw that the walls of Epoca had been fresh painted and covered in a beautiful new tilework.

The place looked kind of shiny and new. But when I scoured each floor and looked at the product, it was the same old knock-off clothing from China, surely made in a special factory in Guangdong that says, “For Cuba Only, Definitely Inferior Polyester Goods”.

There were some table and chair sets on the top floor, but they looked cheap for the price that was attached. I went round to each chair at every table and touched it to see how good were the legs; 100% of them wobbled badly, the sign of a nasty product. The mattresses were also exorbitant, considering they appeared to be foam. The locals poured through this shop but did not appear to be laying down the shekels. Only the sneakers appeared to be genuine product.

My next stop had also been undergoing renovations in May; the old Woolworths Ten Cent now known as TraSval. So transformed was this store that I first passed it by. Actually, it has been painted an ugly kind of pink which hurt my eyes. The original doors have been replaced by another shade of ugly, so bad that I did not even take a photo.

Inside, I was nearly blinded. The interior of the Woolworths Ten Cent was completely gutted, the walls painted white and shelves erected to the ceiling. At first glance it reminded me of a Home Hardware on a smaller scale. On closer inspection, it did turn out to be largely hardware and more shitty tables with tilting chairs.

The prices were two to three times what they would cost in America.

Again, the place was packed with the curious but few were pulling out their wallets. It did seem strange that suddenly the Cuban Government was importing camping gear; bug spray, flashlights, camping stoves, rainwear, climbing equipment and much more. Could this too have been a donation that fell into the wrong hands? Most shoppers left, like me, with only a few one dollar lighters.

The peso markets in Havana were dismal when compared with May. I could find only a handful of stallkeepers at each and they had only limited supplies of garlic and yam plus two fruits; oranges and fruita bomba.

The word on the street was that by Christmas it would be like the worst time of the Special Period. I do not doubt that.

I give you these observations for what they are worth.

Yedi Zak

Posted by Val Prieto at October 14, 2008 09:08 AM

Comments

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