Customers say that the State took over the business after the independent media reported on the place
14ymedio, Havana, August 24, 2024 — The saga of the China Import store continues this Saturday with dozens of Havanans who, given its closure “until further notice,” continue to come to the surroundings to ask what will become of the so-called “Chinese Costco” of Manglar and Oquendo. According to the information provided by a staff member of the building where it leased space, the business is being audited. At the fence in front of the establishment, both tension and uncertainty grow.
On Friday, the store, located in the municipality of Cerro, was closed, a day after 14ymedio dedicated a report to the promising establishment. Those who crowded together at China Import on Saturday were repeating that, after the publication, the State had taken over the business and forced its closure.
The version of the closure that circulates among those present is that the owner of China Import, from an Asian country, has his Cuban wife appear as the official owner of the store. “El Chino,” as a staff member calls him, “asked them to remove the phone number (from the entrance sign) because he wasn’t able to eat or sleep. What they’re doing now is an audit, and el Chino ordered everything to stop.”
“If you have a small business and they arrive (the inspectors) and tell you ‘give me the license,’ you show it and that’s that. But when it is something of this dimension, usually when the ’compañeros’ come they check it. Maybe Monday it’s not open, but maybe they will open on Tuesday or Wednesday. The owner said ’closed until we’re done’ because he can’t be in one place and then another. They have to understand.”
“The owner is a Cuban woman,” the man insisted, “although everyone is saying that it’s el Chino. He is also a Cuban citizen, although he was born in China.” The building, he said, houses the China Import warehouse. There are six other businesses that lease the old industrial building. “His private address is somewhere else.” Several of those present did not believe his explanation.
Between diatribes and gestures, several of those present cried out for the opening of the premises. Others criticized the functioning, in their opinion unstable, of the private sector and the MSMEs. Some insulted the “magazine,” an incorrect designation for the independent media that reported on the business this week. “Closing a store because of what a magazine said… The magazine will continue to say whatever it wants!” a customer shouted.
This Friday, when 14ymedio called the contact who was still available on a sheet of paper at the entrance of the perimeter fence – no longer under the word “Chino” but with the name “Melissa” – a person with an Asian accent reiterated that the store was closed and that they were waiting for “directions.”
From the front of the gigantic warehouse, until a few years ago part of the old Sabatés soap factory, they had removed the sign with the name of the business, leaving visible the unpainted letters of “Suchel Debon,” the state-owned company in whose hands it passed after the Revolution.
Some ventured that the closure might have something to do with the prices: “What happened is that they probably told “El Chino”: you can’t sell at this price, you have to sell at what we tell you.” In any case, the closure happened without prior notice. “I think they didn’t expect anything, because yesterday we came and they told us to come back tomorrow, and then the sign was there. Today they knocked it down,” said a young woman in the group that crowded around in the morning.
Some customers have ventured that the closure of the business may have had to do with the low prices it offered
China Import, which was offered as a store for wholesalers, housed endless rows of shelves with all kinds of goods – clothing, footwear, electronics and household items, perfumes – at prices between three and five times lower than in the informal market. As an employee explained to this newspaper on Wednesday, she accepted national currency, “at the change of the day” – as the signs under the products said, referring to the informal rate, currently at 320 pesos per dollar, both in cash and in bank transfer, but in no way in banknotes of less than 200 pesos.
The condition to acquire the merchandise, of course, was not easy for anyone: spend more than 50 dollars – equivalent to 16,000 pesos according to the current exchange rate – and carry the items yourself in huge packages.
The “Chinese Costco,” as a client sarcastically called it this week, has suffered the same fate as the so-called “Cuban Costco,” the Diplomarket. This supermarket, which sold in foreign currency, closed at the end of last June, and its owner, the Cuban-American Frank Cuspinera Medina, was arrested with his wife. His whereabouts are still unknown.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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