From foreign DVDs to perfume, rum and coffee, Cuba’s shelves are packed with pirated and counterfeit goods that are sold as authorities turn a blind eye, using the long-standing US embargo as justification.
The more than 50-year-long US trade freeze with communist-ruled Havana has bred a healthy appetite for smuggled goods, including TV series, films, music and software — all available at a low cost.
“Here, everything costs one CUC,” 28-year-old vendor Jorge said as he stood before three bookcases packed with CDs and DVDs, using the acronym for the Cuban convertible peso equivalent to US$1.
In southern Havana’s October 10 neighborhood, where Jorge peddles his wares, pirated DVDs of current US blockbusters, children’s movies and Latin music are on offer.
For Jorge, the cost of doing business is affordable: For 60 Cuban pesos (US$2.50) a month, he can buy a vendor’s license to sell his goods. He is one of half a million Cubans who work in the 200 or so independent jobs authorized under Cuban President Raul Castro’s economic reforms.
Although buying and selling pirated goods is technically illegal in Cuba, the trade is widely known and mostly tolerated, even by the government’s Committee for the Defense of the Revolution officers.
“I pay for my license on time and no one interferes with my work,” said Jorge, who declined to give his full name.
Like many other merchants, Jorge’s stock extends far beyond entertainment DVDs. He also sells “packages,” which feature hundreds of megabytes of data obtained weekly from overseas sources. The bundles include TV series, sports programs, films, anti-virus software and up-to-date listings from banned classified Web sites Revolico and Porlalivre.
The prohibited classified listings sites in Cuba offer buyers anything from air conditioners to black-market tires and even empty perfume bottles to be secretly refilled in off-the-grid factories.
With the help of complicit employees, some of the black-market fragrances and other items even find their way to the shelves of government-owned stores.
Every so often, the heavily censored state-run media report on police busting illegal rings producing fake perfume, rum, beer, coffee or toiletries — items rarely found in supermarkets — but authorities mostly ignore the contraband sales.
Authorities struggle to contain this Cuban “tradition,” which emerged during the dark days of severe shortages in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of Cuba’s staunchest Cold War-era allies.
“The new situation in the 1990s was so sudden, so violent, so unexpected ... that people started, with the only means they had, to find ways to fulfill their needs,” sociologist Mayra Espina said in online newspaper Cuba Contemporanea. “Certain activities previously deemed unacceptable or socially negative started to become legitimate.”
This time of shortages bred a social phenomenon called la lucha, or “the struggle,” which has seen Cubans do whatever is necessary to tackle the island nation’s social and economic malaise, Espina said.
Pirated programs have also crept into the state’s sphere, with public media and government-owned cinemas running shows and films obtained illegally.
Some television networks lacking their own means to produce original programming have “resorted for years to carrying shows from American channels without paying for the rights,” Cuban TV director Juan Pin Vilar told reporters.
This is one of the fringe benefits of the US embargo: Cuban TV channels and cinemas can act with virtual impunity since the blockade makes legal repercussions unlikely.
“There is a kind of tactical willingness [in the US] not to bother Cuba because culture ... is a very effective means of communication,” said Jorge de Armas, a member of a group of Cuban exiles calling for a rapprochement with Washington.
Yet Vilar said the flip side of this is that certain stations in Miami — home to most of the Cuban diaspora — air Cuban programs to satisfy viewers nostalgic for home.
On Miami’s Calle Ocho in the heart of Little Havana, the Maraka shop sells pirated music, films and programs brought in from Cuba.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, booked its first-ever profit from its Arizona subsidiary in the first half of this year, four years after operations began, a company financial statement showed. Wholly owned by TSMC, the Arizona unit contributed NT$4.52 billion (US$150.1 million) in net profit, compared with a loss of NT$4.34 billion a year earlier, the statement showed. The company attributed the turnaround to strong market demand and high factory utilization. The Arizona unit counts Apple Inc, Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc among its major customers. The firm’s first fab in Arizona began high-volume production
VOTE OF CONFIDENCE: The Japanese company is adding Intel to an investment portfolio that includes artificial intelligence linchpins Nvidia Corp and TSMC Softbank Group Corp agreed to buy US$2 billion of Intel Corp stock, a surprise deal to shore up a struggling US name while boosting its own chip ambitions. The Japanese company, which is adding Intel to an investment portfolio that includes artificial intelligence (AI) linchpins Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), is to pay US$23 a share — a small discount to Intel’s last close. Shares of the US chipmaker, which would issue new stock to Softbank, surged more than 5 percent in after-hours trading. Softbank’s stock fell as much as 5.4 percent on Tuesday in Tokyo, its
COLLABORATION: Softbank would supply manufacturing gear to the factory, and a joint venture would make AI data center equipment, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) would operate a US factory owned by Softbank Group Corp, setting up what is in the running to be the first manufacturing site in the Japanese company’s US$500 billion Stargate venture with OpenAI and Oracle Corp. Softbank is acquiring Hon Hai’s electric-vehicle plant in Ohio, but the Taiwanese company would continue to run the complex after turning it into an artificial intelligence (AI) server production plant, Hon Hai chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) said yesterday. Softbank would supply manufacturing gear to the factory, and a joint venture between the two companies would make AI data
DOLLAR SIGNS: The central bank rejected claims that the NT dollar had appreciated 10 percentage points more than the yen or the won against the greenback The New Taiwan dollar yesterday fell for a sixth day to its weakest level in three months, driven by equity-related outflows and reactions to an economics official’s exchange rate remarks. The NT dollar slid NT$0.197, or 0.65 percent, to close at NT$30.505 per US dollar, central bank data showed. The local currency has depreciated 1.97 percent so far this month, ranking as the weakest performer among Asian currencies. Dealers attributed the retreat to foreign investors wiring capital gains and dividends abroad after taking profit in local shares. They also pointed to reports that Washington might consider taking equity stakes in chipmakers, including Taiwan Semiconductor
RSS