It seemed that electronic commerce was being developed in Cuba with more caution than daring until COVID-19 arrived. But suddenly, the need to maintain physical distance triggered the demand for this modality, which outside the island is the most natural thing in the world; however, for Cubans it remains a pending subject.
Receiving a pizza at your door, buying basic necessities without languishing in a line in the sun for hours, or paying phone and electricity bills from a cell phone screen are “luxuries” that Cubans are now beginning to enjoy, thanks to the government’s acceleration of “nationally produced” payment platforms.
With more or less similar benefits, Transfermóvil and EnZona stand out as the leading options for the payment of goods and services in a country from which it is impossible to use international gateways due to the well-known limitations of the U.S. blockade.
With almost one and a half million users, Transfermóvil boasts that every six seconds a customer uses its services. EnZona, for its part, is proud to have grown exponentially in the last year and to have registered, activated and put into operation 287 businesses – both state and private – with a transfer volume that approached 70 million pesos in the first ten days of January 2021, according to official sources.
But it is precisely in the use that the private sector can make of both tools where the weak points of these platforms lie. Developers don’t seem too interested in integrating the emerging sector of Cuban entrepreneurs into their platforms.
Although it is true that Transfermóvil and EnZona have opened spaces for self-employed workers, these are generally quite elementary: service modules designed to virtually manage the payments of a business or trade. More recently, the possibility of opening rudimentary stores emerged, in the case of EnZona the so-called ‘Boulevard,’ an opportunity with which this gateway could become an integrating scenario for Cuba’s online trade.
The evident predominance of the state sector in these spaces, with offers that are not always attractive or competitive, and the absence of private businesses with a name already established within the country’s commercial network, show how much progress still needs to be made in the integration e-commerce in Cuba. The possibility of purchasing paella for home delivery from a private restaurant in Vedado, or toiletries from Tu Envío, and that all these financial procedures “run” on Made in Cuba platforms, for the sake of technological sovereignty, could be a reality in the not too distant future.
What is missing, however, is the possibility of integrating the online stores and the applications developed by Cuban entrepreneurs with the application programming interfaces (APIs) of these platforms, because e-commerce – as the whole world has known for decades – is a win-win transaction.