The building of the same name located across the street was dismantled and converted into a warehouse
14ymedio, Dario Hernandez, Havana, 12 February 2025 — It has been just over a year since the grand opening of Havana’s 3rd and 70th Supermarket, the figurehead of dollarization in Cuba, but it feels like a lifetime. The establishment, located on the ground floor of the luxurious Gran Muthu Habana Hotel in Miramar, is a far cry from the one whose shelves were once overflowing with a wide variety of products. Although it is still clean and well-lit, it is now just a shadow of its former self.
Rows of bare shelves, other shelves repeatedly stocked with the same product, and prohibitive prices even for shoppers who receive remittances or income in foreign currency—this was the scene at the supermarket on Wednesday. “If this is empty, anything can happen, because it used to be the best-stocked store in the country,” asserted a Havana resident who had been shopping there since it opened.
Where canned goods, pasta, oils, and cleaning products once alternated, now only metal shelves remain. In other sections, the scarcity is disguised by an artificial overabundance, with the same item repeated again and again, as if quantity substituted for variety. “There are more empty spaces than usual,” a customer remarks as he walks through the store without a cart, aware that there isn’t much to choose from.
This scarcity of offerings is compounded by the problem of prices. The few products available are sold at “exorbitantly high” prices, according to several shoppers. These same items—or their equivalents—can be found on the street, in informal markets, and paid for in Cuban pesos, albeit at the cost of illegality and runaway inflation. The supermarket, conceived as a showcase of order and supply, has lost any advantage over the informal market.
One of the clearest symbols of this transformation was the closure of the market that operated in freely convertible currency (MLC) across the street from the same establishment at 3rd and 70th, bearing the same name. It hasn’t just been “dismantled,” says a local resident, but converted into a warehouse for the neighboring market that operates in dollars. “It’s like the prince and the pauper,” the man says ironically, summarizing the coexistence of privileged spaces for those who can pay in foreign currency and the growing precariousness for everyone else.
Opened on January 31, 2024, the 3rd and 70th Street Supermarket was the first of the establishments that accepted payment exclusively in dollars, a type of store that has since proliferated in Cuban cities. Intended to as a source of foreign currency for a state increasingly short of it, the store offered at least the illusion of variety and abundance. Now, it is nothing more than a shell, a stark reminder of an economic system in its death throes.
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