Cuban shoppers hunt bargains across the globe
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Most people don’t think of Haiti as a shopping destination. Unless they’re Cuban.
Every afternoon, hundreds of Cubans swarm a rutted crossroads in the capital of the hemisphere’s poorest nation, hunting clothes, light bulbs, perfume and other goods that are in short supply back home.
Haitian vendors blast Cuban reggaeton music to draw in shoppers. In a year-old cafe painted with Cuban flags, Havana-born Angelina Luis Dominguez and niece Yeleny Terry Luis serve black beans, rice and roast pork to compatriots on lunch breaks.
“There are thousands, thousands of Cubans,” Luis Dominquez said.
The “Cuban market” in Portau-Prince is part of a global trade, estimated to top $2 billion, fed by the confluence of Cubans’ increased freedom to travel with the communist state’s continued domination of the economy back home.
Clothing, housewares, hardware, personal-care products and other goods at state-run stores in Cuba cost two or three times what they do elsewhere. And that’s when they are on sale at all in an economy hampered by incessant shortage. What’s more, Cuba’s state monopoly on imports and exports excludes the small but vibrant private sector, which employs more than a half million people who often earn three or four times a state worker’s salary.
Since Cuba did away with a hated exit permit five years ago, Cubans are packing flights to destinations with easy entry requirements. In Port-auPrince, Panama City, Cancun, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, even Moscow, Cubans are packing suitcases with goods for personal use and resale back home.
The Miami-based Havana Consulting Group estimated in an August study that Cubans spent more than $2 billion in 2017 on bringing goods back to the island.
Most of those interviewed said they made near-monthly trips, generating more than $2,000 in extra income a month in a country where annual state salaries are less than $400.