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 flowers to flat-screen TVs for delivery to relatives on the island.
Spanish-based Grupo Excelencias teamed with Cuba’s government to create mallhabana.com, which offers prices in US dollars and says it can deliver products within 24 hours to homes in Havana and get purchases to even the country’s most-remote addresses within three weeks.
“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 on Tuesday.
It also appears to directly challenge US legal limits on shipping funds to Cuba or spending money on the island.
Dozens of the products listed are made in Cuba — like Havana Club rum or iconic guayabera 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 over the Christmas holiday.
Cuba officially canceled Christmas as a holiday in 1966 and long discouraged citizens from openly celebrating it. But the Communist Party temporarily reinstated Dec. 25 as a holiday in 1998 after Pope John Paul II’s visit, and schools, government offices and businesses have begun to routinely close on Christmas in recent years.
This holiday season, baggers and cashiers at state boutiques are passing out copper-hued business cards bearing the mallhabana Web address and the slogan “Your Friendly Purchases” to shoppers in Havana, hoping to entice purchases from visiting exiles.
The cards attracted so much attention that the luxury Palco supermarket on Havana’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 customers and generates “millions of dollars annually” in sales, though he declined to give specifics.
Payment requires a non-US credit card — a rarity among Cubans in the US — or direct money transfers to Excelencias’ Spanish accounts. Customers can also purchase US money orders and ship them to company representatives in Canada, Perez said.
Such transactions would seemingly violate Washington’s nearly 50-year-old trade embargo, which generally prohibits most Americans and US residents from doing business with this country and buying products of Cuban origin.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
Thailand has netted more than 1.3 million kilograms of highly destructive blackchin tilapia fish, the government said yesterday, as it battles to stamp out the invasive species. Shoals of blackchin tilapia, which can produce up to 500 young at a time, have been found in 19 provinces, damaging ecosystems in rivers, swamps and canals by preying on small fish, shrimp and snail larvae. As well as the ecological impact, the government is worried about the effect on the kingdom’s crucial fish-farming industry. Fishing authorities caught 1,332,000kg of blackchin tilapia from February to Wednesday last week, said Nattacha Boonchaiinsawat, vice president of a parliamentary
DEFIANT: Ukraine and the EU voiced concern that ICC member Mongolia might not execute an international warrant for Putin’s arrest over war crimes in Ukraine Russian President Vladimir Putin was yesterday visiting Mongolia with no sign that the host country would bow to calls to arrest him on an international warrant for alleged war crimes stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The trip is Putin’s first to a member country of the International Criminal Court (ICC) since it issued the warrant about 18 months ago. Ahead of his visit, Ukraine called on Mongolia to hand Putin over to the court in The Hague, and the EU expressed concern that Mongolia might not execute the warrant. A spokesperson for Putin last week said that the Kremlin