| | |  Technology News | December 2008 
Website Lets Cubans Abroad Buy Gifts on Island
 Will Weissert - Associated Press
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| | A man decorates a Christmas tree outside the San Francisco convent in Havana, Monday, Dec. 22, 2008.(AP/Javier Galeano) | |
Havana — A country that shunned Christmas for decades is now looking to cash in on the holiday season, promoting an online shopping site designed to let Cubans overseas buy everything from food and flowers to flat-screen TVs for delivery to relatives on the island.
Spanish-based Grupo Excelencias teamed with the communist government to create mallhabana.com, designed to let Cubans in the United States and elsewhere around the world use U.S. dollars to buy gifts for relatives here.
"It's a good business but it's also a way for Cubans (overseas) to help their family members here," Sergio Perez, the Havana director of the Spanish-language site said Tuesday.
It also appears to directly challenge U.S. legal limits on shipping money to Cuba or spending money on the island.
Dozens of the products listed are made in Cuba – like world-famous Havana Club rum or guyabera shirts. Others are imports already stocked by upscale government-run stores, such as 29-inch Panasonic TVs or crunchy peanut butter from Canada.
The site was created in August 2006, but Cuba's government has been promoting it heavily at Christmastime. Baggers and cashiers at state boutiques pass out copper-hued business cards bearing the Web address and the slogan "Your Friendly Purchases" to shoppers in Havana, hoping to entice purchases from exiles visiting for the holidays.
The cards attracted so much attention that the luxury Palco supermarket on the Cuban capital's western outskirts quickly ran out. The store sells expensive, mostly imported goods to foreign diplomats, tourists and Cubans lucky enough to have hard currency.
Perez said the Web site has 20,000 registered costumers and generates "millions of dollars annually" in sales, though he declined to give specifics.
Payment requires a non-U.S. credit card – a rarity among Cubans in the United States – or direct money transfers to Excelencias' Spanish accounts. Customers can also purchase U.S. money orders and ship them to company representatives in Canada, Perez said.
Such transactions would appear to violate Washington's nearly 50-year-old trade embargo against Cuba, which generally prohibits Americans and U.S. residents from spending money on the island. It also targets foreign companies that operate in Cuba .
But a U.S. Treasury Department spokesman on Tuesday declined to comment on the mallhabana case.
Perez maintained that the site is doing nothing wrong.
"The company is Spanish and the United States can't do anything," he said. "Anyway, we carefully guard the information of our registered clients."
The site features a limited range of products at what Americans would consider sky-high prices.
The first item listed under the "computing" is set of eight crayons. Further down the page, a Dell computer that would retail for roughly $450 in the U.S. is offered "on sale" for $1,424. Imported products in Cuba are routinely marked up to over twice their retail value overseas, however.
Transval, a Cuban state transportation company, guarantees home delivery of products sent to Havana addresses within 24 hours. Orders to rural areas can take up to three weeks.
Cuba's government has teamed up with foreign providers to post online shopping sites in the past, though a special effort to promote buying for the winter holidays is unprecedented. Perez said his site has been especially busy as Christmas approaches.
The government officially canceled Christmas as a holiday in 1966 and discouraged citizens from openly celebrating it for decades. The Communist Party temporarily reinstated Dec. 25 as a holiday in 1998 after Pope John Paul II visited the island. Cuban schools, government offices, banks and businesses usually have closed for the holiday in recent years.
New President Raul Castro, who succeeded his ailing 82-year-old brother Fidel in February, has lifted bans on Cubans buying DVD players, computers, electric rice cookers and other coveted electronic goods, but prices remain high.
On the Net: www.MallHabana.com |
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