While the communist Castro dictatorship blames chronic shortages on the island on the embargo, the Cuban military has plenty of products available for exiles and foreigners to buy online in hard currency only. This is socialism in action.
Claudia Padron Cueto reports in CubaNet:
How GAESA Moves Millions of Euros from Online Sales through Spain
At the Guamá store, in the city of Pinar del Río, there are two types of offers that vary according to who is paying: a resident of the island or an émigré.
If you go to its physical location on José Martí street, you can purchase with your “Free Convertible Currency” bank card –the MLC (by its Spanish acronym) is the Cuban bank dollar, which you can only procure with hard currency- a limited number of products: coffee, tomato purée, beer, juices, fruit preserves and, as sole beef offer in November of last year, ground sausages. The shortages are such that, in order not to leave the display cases empty, employees fill them with the same product, over and over again.
Now, if you make your way to Guamá’s website, the variety of products available is amply multiplied. Not only are there more types of food items, but also personal cleaning products, tools, and even bicycles. In the digital store, for instance, instead of just ground sausage, there are 16 other beef products available: meatballs, hamburgers, steak and full pork shanks.
The problem is that the only way to acquire those products on the store’s webpage is by paying with the bank cards linked to international accounts, a transaction that only Cubans who live abroad can make.
In order to implement this new strategy, GAESA has resorted to a new entrepreneurial context. When any individual buys any product in the online Guamá store, that individual is, in fact, making their purchase from two companies registered in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
These companies and others linked to them, were created in recent years by the Graverán family, who is also linked to GAESA, as this investigation ascertained from information obtained from the commercial registries in Spain and Canada.
Continue reading HERE.
It’s all very simple: Castro, Inc. is a criminal enterprise geared to make money any way it can, and there are LOTS of suckers to fleece, even though they know they’re being exploited. It’s a great racket.