It is not your typical used car lot.
Just steps from the Florida Straits, dozens of vehicles bake in the Caribbean sun. An elderly security guard slumps in a sleepy waiting area and customers are nowhere to be seen.
A price list hanging on the green chain-link fence hints at why: US$85,000 for a six-year-old Peugeot compact; US$46,000 for a tiny 2008 Citroen C3 hatchback that would cost less than a third of that in Europe. Elsewhere, a larger, new Peugeot 508 lists for US$262,000, five times its price in Britain — and more than a millennium worth of paychecks in Cuba, where wages average about US$20 a month.
The euphoria that greeted a January reform that lets Cubans buy vehicles from the government without a special permit for the first time in decades turned to anger when the prices were posted. When authorities announced recently that just 50 cars had rolled off the lots of state-run dealerships in the first half-year, bringing in US$1.3 million in sales, it was tempting to call the policy a failure.
However, analysts say it seems the measure was designed to work that way.
“At those prices, they obviously didn’t want to sell many cars,” said Philip Peters, president of the Virginia-based Cuba Research Center. “And they’re not.”
“The only Cuban consumers who can afford it are probably musicians that have got some terrific royalty earnings on their latest record, or people who cashed out fabulously when they sold their family home and I can’t think of anybody else,” Peters said. “It’s a very, very small sliver of the public that could think of affording such prices, and, as we see, an even smaller sliver that actually decides to do it.”
Some islanders initially hoped authorities would adjust prices downward when they got a sense of what the market would bear. That happened when cellphones first appeared in Cuba more than a decade ago.
However, a recent tour of several dealerships in Havana found the same 400 percent markups as before. Not a single potential client was in sight. Employees refused to speak to reporters, though one confirmed that prices have not budged.
There are no publicly available statistics on how many vehicles circulate in Cuba, but visitors to Havana marvel at how empty the streets are for a city of about 2 million people.
Jorge Pinon, a Latin America energy expert at the University of Texas, said Cuba’s reluctance to sell cars is not out of fear of insufficient fuel. The country gets tens of thousands of barrels of oil a day on preferential terms from Venezuela.
However, Pinon said that a huge infusion of vehicles would test the creaky transportation infrastructure of Cuba, where potholes can go unfilled for years and traffic lights are scarce.
Peters suggested officials simply do not see it as a priority and would rather spend what little hard currency available on things like food and industrial inputs.
“I think there’s only one explanation ... the government does not want to use its foreign exchange reserves to import cars for a retail market,” he said. “So therefore the only way that it’s worth it to them, to import a car for US$20,000 and then sell it retail, is to soak up US$50,000 worth of liquidity.”
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of