400 ‘private’ businesses fined in Cuba for price gouging while products disappear from store shelves

From our Bureau of Socialist Equity, Social Justice, and Price Controls with some assistance from our Bureau of Socialist Diet Fads

Once again, Castro, Inc. has displayed its expertise at handling food shortages. This time, it has done so by capping prices and hiring 7,000 inspectors to ensure that stores are obeying the newly-instituted price controls. Yes, this move has proven to be very successful: within the first three days, over 400 greedy store owners were caught and fined for charging more than allowed by Castro, Inc.

Meanwhile, all sorts of food items have quickly disappeared from store shelves and miraculously appeared on the black market, at much higher prices. Wow! Nobel Prize in economics for the geniuses who devised this system. Or maybe the prize should go to all 7,000 inspectors?

Abridged from 14yMedio via Translating Cuba and Havana Times

In less than 72 hours, the Cuban authorities already had almost 400 violators of the price cap for six basic products that came into force on Monday. Last week, the Deputy Minister of Finance and Prices, Lourdes Rodríguez, warned on Canal Caribe that 7,000 inspectors were prepared to verify that the provisions were complied with, and this time their effectiveness has been proven, since on Wednesday night 1,079 “control actions” had been carried out that imposed fines on 393 private individuals, some in response to complaints from the population.

The information was offered by the Minister of Finance and Prices, Vladimir Regueiro Ale, in a television program in which he reviewed the Resolution that marks the highest selling prices for chicken (680 pesos per kilo), oils, not including olive (990 pesos per liter); powdered milk (1,675 pesos per kilo); pasta (835 pesos per kilo); sausages (1,045 pesos per kilo); and detergent powder (630 pesos per kilo). He said that these six products are exempt from import tariffs and that, in addition to the cap on consumer prices, there cannot be a profit margin of more than 30% in sales from the private sector to the State.

Regueiro insisted that the objective is to contain inflation, since the cost of these essential products had progressively increased, and admitted that for a large part of the population they are still very high prices, in particular for retirees or people with low incomes.

However, he said that this measure came from meetings with more than 50,000 “economic actors,” the self-employed, members of cooperatives and owners of private businesses. The State is not subject to this policy, at least for the moment, since stores in Freely Convertible Currency (MLC) sell at prices much higher, as a large part of the population denounced, which, however, admits that it matters little, since there are no products in those establishments. . . .

. . . .Consumers, meanwhile, are divided between those who experience a slight relief from the new prices and those who already feel the lack of products on the street. “Great move. We all knew what they were going to do. Several of the products disappeared in the MSMEs. Now they will sell them secretly and at higher prices. It ’s a war against the State that engendered them and protects them. Control and monitoring of the application of exemplary measures is being imposed,” says a reader of Cubadebate.

A hard hand that asks for more. “They show that the State has the legal force, and, to all those who don’t offer anything, let them boycott the measures, encircle them and that’s it. Stop passing the buck and defend the working people.”