Cuba’s informal market flourishes as Internet use climbs

HAVANA — In the Telegram group chat, the messages roll in like waves.

“I need liquid ibuprofen and acetaminophen, please,” wrote one user. “It’s urgent, it’s for my 10-month-old baby.”

Others offer medicine brought from outside of Cuba, adding, “Write to me in a direct message.” Emoji-speckled lists offer antibiotics, pregnancy tests, vitamins, rash creams, and more.

The group message, which includes 170,000 people, is just one of many that have flourished in recent years in Cuba alongside an exponential increase in Internet usage on the communist-governed island.

The informal sale of everything from eggs to car parts — the country’s so-called black market — is a time-honored practice in crisis-stricken Cuba, where access to the most basic items such as milk, chicken, medicine, and cleaning products has always been limited. The market is technically illegal, but the extent of illegality, in official eyes, can vary by the sort of items sold and how they were obtained.

Before the Internet, such exchanges took place “through your contacts, your neighbors, your local community,” said Ricardo Torres, a Cuban and economics fellow at American University in Washington. “But now, through the Internet, you get to reach out to an entire province.”

With shortages and economic turmoil at the worst they’ve been in years, the online marketplace “has exploded,” he said.

Bustling WhatsApp groups discuss the informal exchange rate, which provides more pesos per dollar or euro than the official bank rate.

Meanwhile, Cuba’s versions of Craigslist — sites such as Revolico, the island's first digital buying-and-selling tool — advertise everything from electric bicycles brought in from other countries to “capitalist apartments” in Havana’s wealthy districts.

Many products are sold in pesos, but higher-priced items are often listed in dollars, with payments either handled in cash or through bank transfers outside the country.

The rise of the new digital marketplaces speaks to a specific brand of creative resilience that Cubans have developed during decades of economic turmoil. Much of the crisis is a result of the US government’s six-decade trade embargo on the island, but critics say it’s also due to government mismanagement of the economy and reluctance to embrace the private sector.

So people on the island tend to be highly resourceful, working with whatever they have available to them — think old cars from the 1950s that still roll through the streets, thanks to mechanics using ingenuity and spare parts to address a shortage of new vehicles.

Entrepreneurs have used the same creativity to deal with what was initially very limited Internet access. Carlos Javier Peña and Hiram Centelles, Cuban expatriates who live in Spain, created Revolico in 2007.

Sales on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Telegram really took off in 2018, when Cubans gained access to the Internet on their phones, something Torres described as a “game changer.”

Between 2000 and 2021 the number of Cubans using the Internet rose from less than 1 percent of the population to 71 percent, International Telecommunications Union data shows.