ECONOMY-CUBA: Anything on the Black Market – Even Crocodiles

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, May 4 2001 (IPS) - The rumour flew through the streets of the Havana neighbourhood. Many believed it was just one of the jokes that regularly crop up in Cuba to help people laugh at the good times and the bad. But it was no joke.

When they heard that baby crocodiles were being sold on the black market, people imagined a crier in the streets shouting “Buy your baby crocodile! Get it hot! Buy it now!”

The conviction that just about anything can be bought on the black market in this socialist nation was confirmed last month, when it occurred to someone to sell baby crocodiles at 50 dollars apiece door to door in Lawton, a working-class neighbourhood near the Havana port.

The unknown vendor was selling the animals to be raised in people’s backyards or bathtubs, fattened and eaten – a common practice in Cuba with pigs, chickens or other livestock as part of the phenomenon of urban agriculture, one of the activities used here to cover food shortages during the economic crisis that set in when the Soviet bloc collapsed.

“They say the meat is delicious. The animals must have been stolen from the zoo or from some government crocodile-breeding farm,” commented a source close to the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment.

Experts say that unlike the underground economies of other Latin American countries, Cuba’s did not serve as a means of income for the poor, nor was it used to sell goods produced by private initiaive, until the 1990s.

Up to 1989, the black market mainly filled in the gaps left by the state’s offer of goods and services, said Alfredo González, an expert at the National Institute of Economic Research (INIE).

A study by González published in the INIE’s magazine stated that in the worst years of the economic crisis which broke out in 1990, the black market ballooned because money continued to be issued while the shelves were bare.

But by 1995, the black market began to shrink due to an increase in goods offered by the state, a tightening of the money supply, and the 1993 legalisation of limited private initiative and services that up to that time had formed part of the underground economy.

However, by the late 1990s, the black market once again demonstrated its ability to adapt, by consolidating its role selling, in Cuban pesos, goods that are only sold in dollars in government stores.

“The black market is adaptable,” said Rafael García, a retired economist. “It is more flexible than the state. It has already learned by heart all of the weakpoints of our institutions, and operates according to the old laws of supply and demand.”

Retail sales in Cuba are monopolised by the state. Goods can be sold by private parties only in the free farmers’ and craft markets that opened in the mid-1990s. There are also markets for industrial products, but the offer is limited and the goods are generally of poor quality.

A majority of the finished products sold on the black market are “hot” or stolen goods. And in the case of crafts, most were produced using raw materials skimmed off some state enterprise.

Authorities have systematically tried to clamp down on theft by employees of public companies and to curb the growth of the black market. But when they deal a blow over here, vendors and resellers appear again over there.

“I buy everything I can from the vendors who sell things door to door,” said a 59-year-old pensioner who said she buys milk, coffee, flour, bread, butter and fish “always at a good price.

“The fish shop salesman sells me fish, the baker sells me flour, and the sister of a docker brings me powdered milk” when the boats come in, she said.

Perhaps the steadiest market is for milk. The state guarantees milk at subsidised prices for children up to the age of seven, but the rest of the population must buy powdered milk at 5.80 dollars a kg, when it costs a dollar a pound (0.44 kgs) on the black market.

The pensioner, who lives in the fashionable Havana neighbourhood of Miramar, said she draws the line at meat, because “you just don’t know if it’s in good condition.”

Besides its traditional function of covering shortages, in recent years the black market has become an alternative for the self-employed to buy the raw materials and inputs they need.

“When I opened my cafe, everything I sold was produced in my house,” said Andrés, a self-employed worker who preferred not to give his last name. “But I couldn’t deal with the high prices, the taxes and the fines charged by inspectors.”

Most of the meals and snacks he offers his customers today at the same prices he charged in the past come from the black market. “Later, I buy sales receipts from the employees of some store, and I have something to show the inspectors,” he explained.

Esteban Ramos, a salesman in a government-run store, admitted that not even companies run on mixed capital are capable of providing a steady supply of goods to their clients like state- owned stores or service establishments.

Illegal vendors take advantage of the gaps, selling products to government stores, in complicity with the employees of state-run companies. “They not only bring stolen goods, but products they made themselves as well,” said Ramos.

The phenomenon was first seen in the cigars manufactured in clandestine workshops to be sold to tourists who cannot afford the high prices charged at the government-run Casas del Habano.

But the practice has spread, and people now bottle rum, beer or soft drinks in their homes, for example, and sell them to government bars and stores. The clandestine businesses buy the bottles and labels under the counter from the employees of state- run factories.

Government studies have portrayed those who resort to such practices as unemployed or unskilled workers with anti-social habits like alcoholism.

But most of those who hang around the stores selling everything from socks to alarm clocks are people from the interior who come to Havana to escape the crisis and acute unemployment in their regions.

Some illegal vendors visit Havana every week from provinces as far away as Santa Clara or Camagüey, 300 and 700 kms from the capital, respectively, lugging the cheese, shrimp or lobster they sell to their regular clients.

The 1998 National Survey on Internal Migration found that most of those who came to Havana in the mid-1990s did not look for jobs, and mainly dedicated themselves to illicit activities on the underground market.

But a physician who has been in practice for 15 years and who sells “whatever I can find, no matter where it comes from” in his free time, told IPS that “that is just a stereotype.

“You can find anything on the black market. You just have to look for it,” said the doctor, who consoles himself by rationalising that no one in Cuba has clean hands. “Those who don’t sell like I do, buy on the black market, which is illegal too,” he argued.