The decision by high-end retailer Victorinox to open a store in Havana left many people scratching their heads.
Hard currency is finding its way into the hands of more Cubans thanks to a flourishing tourism industry
Who, in cash-strapped Cuba, would be able to afford the pricey Swiss emporium’s deluxe cutlery, sleek luggage items and precision watches?
Lots of folks, it would seem.
“We sell to tourists from Russia, China, Mexico and Venezuela – they say the prices here are cheaper than in other countries,” an employee at the store, which opened a little more than a year ago, told AFP.
And it’s not just foreigners: growing numbers of Cubans with access to dollars also have the wherewithal to go shopping there, as it turns out.
Some get their income from ‘paladares’ the privately-run restaurants where tourists pay for their meals in hard currency.
Others get cash thanks to the largesse of relatives from overseas who send money from time to time.
In short, 14 months after its grand opening, business is brisk at Victorinox and other Western stores with outlets on one of Marxist capitalism’s last outposts.
In a sign that communism is slowly giving way to consumerism, other stores are locating here, with names familiar in shopping malls around the world, such as Mango, Benetton, and Adidas.
It is what one Cuban official told AFP is a “restructuring” of what a relatively short time ago was still a classless society.
In a country where anyone who receives a government pay cheque is rarely able to make ends meet, business nevertheless is booming at Western stores such as Victorinox.
Even the least expensive of Victorinox’s wares is costly for most in Cuba, where the monthly pay – the same for all salaried workers on this communist island – is around €13.50 per month.
And yet, a shopping spree at a store is no longer off-limits to many Cubans, said Ariel Terrero, a leading economist, who also noted the marked realignment in Cuban society.
Terrero in remarks on state television last week identified four distinct strata in Cuban society today: Low income, middle income, upper middle income and high income.
‘There is a slow redistribution of wealth,” he said.
There are a number of reasons for the dramatic realigning of Cuba’s social order, not least economic reforms aimed at putting more cash into circulation, introduced by Raoul Castro – who succeeded his brother, the more ideologically pure revolutionary Fidel Castro, in August 2006.
But it is also clear that hard currency is finding its way into the hands of more Cubans thanks to a flourishing tourism industry.
In the eastern town of Ciego de Avila, Juan Rodriguez was able to purchase a house, thanks to the foreign currency tips he stashed away over years of working as a hotel bartender.
It’s not hard to see evidence of the seismic shift in the consumption patterns of Cubans.
In 2011, Cubans became the second largest group of tourists on the island after the Canadians. Some three million Cubans spent the night in hotels on the island – 93,400 in five-star hotels where a room can cost more than €75 a night.
The cash influx is also being felt in Havana’s formerly faded old neighbourhoods that are bring spruced up after decades of decay and neglect.