Customers can pay with MLC, but employees suggest that they are going to remove this option
14ymedio, Juan Diego Rodriguez/Olea Gallardo, Havana, 6 January 2025 –Although it has not attracted as much attention as the Supermarket on 3rd and 70th, which opened a day later, the store on Infanta and Santa Marta in Havana is another of the new “dollarized” Caribe stores that the military conglomerate Gaesa (Business Administration Group) opened in recent days through its Cimex corporation. In this case, the establishment is presented as “a collaboration project with the supplier Vima.”
In fact, its shelves, which are impeccable and full, carry a few Chinese products but are mainly dominated the Vima brand, founded by the Spaniard Víctor Moro Suárez and much reviled by the inhabitants of the Island for its low quality.
Unlike 3rd and 70th, cash dollars are not accepted at Infanta and Santa Marta, but, as at the brand new Miramar establishment, you can pay with the Classic card, which is recharged with US currency.
Another difference is that you can still pay with freely convertible currency (MLC), although employees suggested that this will not be the case for long. “You can pay with MLC, but I recommend that you get the Clásica card, because the lines to get it afterwards are going to be violent,” said a cashier at Infanta and Santa Marta to a customer who was entering for the first time. “Are they going to remove the MLC?” he asked, to which the woman replied: “That’s what they say.”
Posters distributed by the store and other employees, as well as Cimex’s own posts on its social networks, also encourage users to buy the Clásica card, which costs 5 dollars (one of which remains as a balance). Operative in hotels, state stores and gas stations in dollars, its use applies a 5% discount in stores and 10% in hotels, but with each refill one dollar is “discounted.”
Although the country’s top authorities have not said anything about it, the obligation to pay in dollars and the incentive to use the Classic card – created at the beginning of last year – can be considered as another step towards the dollarization of transactions in Cuba, which Prime Minister Manuel Marrero spoke about last month before the National Assembly and, with it, the effective end of the use of MLC.
The first thing that catches your attention at Infanta and Santa Marta, however, is the number of security guards multiplying in the corridors. Above all, in contrast to the only worker who performs the function of checking the bags on the way out. This Sunday, faced with the delay in the line to leave and the consequent protests from the customers, the employee argued: “And what do you want me to do, if I am the only one?” To which a man snapped: “But look how there are people here doing nothing, they should put someone there to help you.”
“It’s nice and has a lot of things, but as always, not everyone can afford this,” lamented a pensioner outside the shop who only bought a 3-kilogram package of powdered detergent (for $8.95). “And well, a lot of green,” she said, highlighting the color of Vima. “I didn’t buy any food, because I can’t even look at that brand, which isn’t exactly cheap.”
Highly criticized by Cubans for its poor quality, Vima has been present on the island, with privileges that most companies do not have, since 1994, although it was registered in the National Registry of Foreign Commercial Representations only in October of last year.
The partnership with Gaesa is not new for Vima, which has its headquarters in Havana in the Berroa area, owned by the Armed Forces business consortium. Its founder, Víctor Moro Suárez, has lived in Cuba for more than 25 years and was president of the Association of Spanish Businessmen in Cuba.
Before this rebirth, the store on Infanta and Santa Marta had gone through different stages. With the dollarization of the economy in the 1990s, it became one of the best-stocked markets in the Cuban capital – like the old “diplotienda” on 3rd and 70th, opposite the new Supermarket – where one could pay directly with the US currency and later with convertible pesos.
Located in a border area between Centro Habana and Cerro, the store is surrounded by very poor neighborhoods, such as the El Platanito settlement. Its wealthiest neighbors were, until recently, the residents of the nearby Fama y Aplauso building, whose apartments were distributed among Cuban cultural figures, spokespeople for the regime, and journalists prominent in the so-called Battle of Ideas, an ideological turnaround promoted at the beginning of this century. However, the most powerful figures have ended up moving out of the building and into neighborhoods to the west of the city. The new market thus has to deal with the impoverishment of a neighborhood where the dollar does not circulate, and even less so the Clásica card.
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