“I need liquid ibuprofen and acetaminophen, please,” wrote one user. “It’s urgent, it’s for my 10-month-old baby.”
Before the Internet, such exchanges took place “through your contacts, your neighbors, your local community,” said Ricardo Torres, a Cuban and economics fellow at American University in Washington. “But now, through the Internet, you get to reach out to an entire province.” Many products are sold in pesos, but higher-priced items are often listed in dollars, with payments either handled in cash or through bank transfers outside the country.
“What we can’t allow is that those who don’t work, don’t contribute and break the law earn more and have more opportunities to live well than those who actually contribute,” he said during a meeting with government officials. “If we did that…we’d be breaking the concepts of socialism.”“This medicine goes to the people who need it, people who have respiratory issues,” he said. “Those who use them are people who really need them…. More than anything else, we sell antibiotics.
Entrepreneurs have used the same creativity to deal with what was initially very limited Internet access. Carlos Javier Peña and Hiram Centelles, Cuban expatriates who live in Spain, created Revolico in 2007 to help “alleviate the hardships of life in Cuba.” Between 2000 and 2021 the number of Cubans using the Internet rose from less than 1 percent of the population to 71 percent, International Telecommunications Union data shows. The Internet was a lifeline for Heriberto and many other Cubans during the Covid-19 pandemic, they said.