CUBA'S INFORMAL MARKET FINDS NEW SPACE ON GROWING INTERNET

In the Telegram group chat, the messages roll in like waves.

“I need liquid ibuprofen and acetaminophen, please,” wrote one user. “It’s urgent, it’s for my 10-month-old baby.”

Others offer medicine brought from outside of Cuba, adding, “Write to me in a direct message.” Emoji-speckled lists offer antibiotics, pregnancy tests, vitamins, rash creams and more.

The group message, which includes 170,000 people, is just one of many that have flourished in recent years in Cuba alongside an exponential increase in internet usage on the communist-governed island.

The informal sale of everything from eggs to car parts – the country’s so-called black market – is a time-honored practice in crisis-stricken Cuba, where access to the most basic items such as milk, chicken, medicine and cleaning products has always been limited. The market is technically illegal, but the extent of illegality, in official eyes, can vary by the sort of items sold and how they were obtained.

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.”

With shortages and economic turmoil at the worst they’ve been in years, the online marketplace “has exploded,” Torres said.

Bustling WhatsApp groups discuss the informal exchange rate, which provides more pesos per dollar or euro than the official bank rate.