Havana (AFP)

When Jorge Noris made his first purchases on the internet, they never arrived. In Cuba, the experience of online commerce, encouraged in times of pandemic, turned into a fiasco and pushed the communist authorities to a mea culpa.

"After a month, the store called me to ask if the order had arrived," said the 34-year-old computer specialist, stunned by the question and having to travel to be reimbursed.

Father of two children aged seven months and three, and living in an outlying area of ​​Havana, he found it "very convenient to do your shopping from home".

But "I made forty orders and I had forty problems", with purchases almost always late or incomplete.

Worldwide, the online food trade has been boosted by the coronavirus, which has confined consumers to their homes, with increases of up to 300% in Italy and Spain, 100% in France according to the firm Nielsen.

For Cuba, it's new: 3G did not arrive until the end of 2018 and the local internet racing site Tuenvio has just been launched.

His mission? Limit queues, recurrent due to shortages. The island, under American embargo since 1962, imports 80% of what it consumes.

Pain lost: many are forced to go and wait in front of the stores to file a complaint or recover the missing products.

- "Crisis solution" -

On television, President Miguel Diaz-Canel recognized it: "We have more complaints related to electronic commerce than to health attention to the pandemic". The island has only 2,318 cases for 11.2 million inhabitants.

His explanation? "Reality has exceeded capacity".

Jorge Noris, whose blog Tuandroid is dedicated to new technologies, translates this into IT terms: "the servers were not prepared for this request".

The shock was severe for Tuenvio, which went from around a hundred visits a day at the start to between 6,000 and 8,000, when the government ordered the closure of many supermarkets, which now only sell online.

Orders rose from 1,356 in February to 6,000 in March, 73,386 in April and 78,893 in the first half of May.

"Tuenvio must be put in context: it is a crisis solution for a moment of crisis, carried out fairly quickly, perhaps without the time or the necessary reflection, without studying the successful experiences" elsewhere, says Juan Triana, professor at Cuban Economic Studies Center.

And "electronic commerce will not solve the fundamental problem in Cuba: the supply deficit which is not linked to Covid-19 but existed long before".

"Obviously, it could have been done better," he adds, particularly in terms of organization, because "suddenly the delivery locations have multiplied, the customers too, but without the logistics to guarantee distribution".

- No Amazon -

In front of the Cuatro Caminos supermarket in Havana, trucks, vans and even taxis are used to load orders, grouped in large transparent plastic bags.

Yahima De Los Santos, 43-year-old housewife, comes to pick up her purchases: "I prefer to come to the store myself, it's safer so nothing is missing", she confides, however delighted with the experience: "for me, it's one of the best things, because it's not easy to queue".

"The only thing I don't like, and a lot of people complain about it, is that you buy online and you have to be very quick because you put a product in your basket and sometimes, when you're going to pay, he's not there anymore! "

Faced with thousands of complaints, the distribution companies Cimex and Tiendas Caribe, owned by the army, have partially closed the site to reformulate its offers.

And even the state media, controlled by the (single) Communist Party, have devoted long critical articles to it: the Cubadebate site, in particular, suspects a "misappropriation" of goods, which some customers say they see delivered to the store, like the chicken, but rarely available online. Under the article, a thousand comments from angry Cubans.

Jorge Noris has resigned himself. "In the world of electronic commerce, the customer experience is important, but in Cuba we leave that aside a little" because "there is no other option: I would like to buy on Amazon, but like this is obviously not possible, I have to buy on Tuenvio ".

© 2020 AFP