Cuba eases consumer controls

Shoppers snapped up DVD players, motorbikes and pressure cookers for the first time as Cuba loosened its control on consumer goods and invited private farmers to plant tobacco, coffee and other crops on unused state land.

Combined with other reforms announced in recent days, the measures suggest real changes are being driven by new president Raul Castro, who vowed when he took over from his brother Fidel to remove some of the more irksome limitations on the daily lives of Cubans.

Cuba-watchers now wonder how far the Communist government will go.

“Cuban people can’t survive on the salaries people are paying them. Average men and women have been screaming that at the top of their lungs for many years,” said Felix Masud-Piloto, director of the Centre for Latino Research at DePaul University. “Now after many years, the government is listening.”

Many of the shoppers filling stores mourned the fact that the goods were unaffordable on the government salaries they earned. But that did not stop them from lining up to see electronic gadgets previously available only to foreigners and companies.

“They should have done this a long time ago,” said a 40-something man, emerging from a shopping centre with a red-and-silver electric motorbike that set him back about €500. The Chinese-made bikes can be charged with a power cord and had been banned for general sale because the government feared a drain on the power grid.

On Monday, the Tourism Ministry said any Cuban with enough money could stay in luxury hotels and rent cars, doing away with restrictions that made ordinary people feel like second-class citizens. And last week, Cuba said citizens would be able to get mobile phones legally in their own names, a luxury long reserved for the lucky few.

The land initiative, however, potentially could put more food on the table of all Cubans and bring in hard currency from exports of tobacco, coffee and other products, providing the cashflows needed to spur a new consumer economy.

Government television said 51% of arable land was underused or fallow, and officials were transferring some of it to individual farmers and associations representing small, private producers.

According to official figures, co-operatives already control 35% of arable land – and produce 60% of the island’s agricultural output.

“Everyone who wants to produce tobacco will be given land to produce tobacco, and it will be the same with coffee,” said Orlando Lugo, the president of Cuba’s national farmers association.

The change is a contrast to the early days of Cuba’s revolution, when the government forced or encouraged private farmers to turn their land over to the state or form government-controlled collective farms. But without more details, it was difficult to tell the significance of the programme, which began last year but was announced only this week.

Lines formed before the doors opened yesterday at the Galerias Paseos shopping centre on Havana’s famed seaside Malecon boulevard, and shoppers wasted little time once inside.

There was no sign yet of computers and microwaves, highly anticipated items that shop staff across Havana insisted would appear soon on store shelves, with desktop computers retailing for around €430.

Lines outside electronics and speciality shops are common in Cuba because security guards limit how many people can enter at a time. But waits were longer and stores more packed than usual at Havana’s best-known retail outlets and clumps of shoppers and onlookers clustered around display cases at smaller outlets.

“DVDs are over there, down that aisle,” an employee in a white short-sleeved shirt repeated over and over as shoppers wandered into La Copa, an electronics and grocery store across from the Copacabana Hotel.

“Very good! DVD players on sale for everybody,” exclaimed Clara, an elderly woman peering at a black JVC console. “Of course nobody has the money to buy them.”

Like many Cubans, Clara chatted freely but would not give her full name to a foreign reporter.