Due to the lack of fuel, almost all of the disposable diapers produced in Cuba are distributed in Havana and a small percentage in neighboring provinces. The data is revealed by the director of retail sales of Cimex in a Article from Cubadebate dedicated to the scarcity of this basic product.
The text recalls that disposable diapers began to be produced in Cuba in 2019 through a Vietnamese company whose factory is located in the Mariel Special Development Zone. The plant planned to produce 120 million diapers a year, but parents still can’t find them and “when they appear they run out in half an hour or the resellers buy them,” denounces a mother who points out that, on the other hand, they are never “missing in MLC” .
Last February, 14ymedio told that had to prove having children to buy diapers in stores in national currency, which caused disputes between customers who had approached the store without carrying the card and the employees who demanded it.
The plant planned to produce 120 million diapers a year, but parents still can’t find them and “when they appear they run out within half an hour or are bought by resellers”
The Thai Binh Global Investment Corporation pledged that same month to continue producing diapers, wipes and pads and sell them in local currency. On its Facebook page, the stores where they are going to be marketed and the available sizes are reported every week, but many doubt that the information is true, since when they go they do not find what is advertised.
Yusleydi Lezcano Palmero, director of retail sales at Cimex, assures that the situation has improved, since in the first quarter of the year there were 94.3% more diapers than in the same period of the previous year and that the chain has even reduced imports to “strengthen the supplier of Mariel”. However, the problem, according to the official, is that there is “overdemand”, a concept that Cubadebate is forced to translate at the end of the text.
“In economics, overdemand is understood as the situation in which the quantity demanded (demand) of a product or service exceeds the quantity offered (supply). This is the opposite of excess supply,” says the official newspaper in a didactic display , which you have copied the wikipedia explanation of the term “excess demand”, but omitting the first definition that appears: scarcity.
“Cimex does not intervene. It is a direct delivery to the store. The culeros do not go through any warehouse, taking into account the needs of Cuban families”
Lezcano Palmero says that this April the plan was for 91,297 packages, of which 85,442 have been delivered. All were sold in less than 72 hours, explains the official, who remembers the control with a card for sale. This reflects how, despite the increase in production, the shortage is notable.
Lezcano Palmero points out that the difficulties in acquiring raw material “due to the crisis caused by the pandemic” have had an influence, but he disassociates himself from the matter and blames the Vietnamese manufacturing company.
“Cimex does not intervene. It is a direct delivery to the store. assholes they do not go through any warehouse, taking into account the needs of Cuban families,” she says. The official admits that there have also been problems with distribution, also the fault of Thai Binh, which distributes, according to the contract.
“Sometimes we have had potholes, because due to an internal logistical issue of the Vietnamese company, the assholes they arrive minutes or hours later or they don’t arrive on the agreed day,” he justifies. But when asked why there are places where they never appear, he admits the privilege of the capital.
“The priority has been 94.5% Havana, then the rest of the nearby provinces, which has to do with the logistics issue due to the fuel situation, which today affects everyone,” he acknowledges.
“The priority has been 94.5% Havana, then the rest of the nearby provinces, which has to do with logistics due to the situation with fuel, which today affects everyone”
Isla de la Juventud, according to what he says, has a “differentiated” treatment, but they have not received it lately either because of “the weather situation.”
The first assholes disposables that were sold in Cuba arrived with the economic opening of the 90s and the dollarization of the economy. Until then there were only cloth ones, which were washed after each use. But the sale was only in dollars or convertible pesos, which turned them into a segregating element between those who could not afford them and those who received remittances or had income in foreign currency.
The Vietnamese company, which had been in Cuba for decades, announced in 2018 the construction of a plant to produce diapers and its purpose of “providing local consumers with articles made in Cuba and of high quality”.
But three years after the start of its operations, a step back has been taken and disposables have once again become the border between those who can have foreign currency and those who cannot.
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