Cuba’s Mail Service between Inefficiency and Technology
HAVANA TIMES — An application for mobile devices that allows tracking a postal shipment, telegram or national and international money wires is now available to any customer of the Cuban postal company Empresa de Correos de Cuba.
Interestingly, now Cubans will know where the packages they send are during the months it takes for them to reach their destination. It would really be much more useful to design an application for employees of Correos de Cuba that would allow a faster delivery process.
The population’s complaints about the postal service are constant because of delays and theft. They are frequent from the tens of thousands of government aid workers abroad – doctors, nurses, teachers, trainers – who sacrifice to improve the nation’s income.
When they want to send help or a gift to the relatives they left behind in Cuba, the shipments are delayed, sometimes a portion is stolen and forces them to use smaller packages that generate more problems for the user and more delay for the revision by Correos.
The Cuban postal sevice is incompetent. DHL is considering ending relations with the cuban postal system as it cost them more money in packages that arrive in cuba but never made it to there destination. If you want to make money send insured packages and insure them for a couple thousand dollars. Then when it arrives in Cuba, it will be lost or stolen. In short it’s like going to a casino.
Carlyle, you really are out of step with this one, renationalizing the railways is one of the most popular demands across the board in Britain, including among Tory voters. Privatisation of the railways is widely recognised to have been and continues to be a disaster. It is only blind ideology that prevents renationalization from taking place at the moment, as I said, against the wishes of the vast majority of the public. Perhaps we can agree on something, so called “natural monopolies” like the railways or electricity benefit from being in public hands.
In short George, private enterprise is more efficient than socialism. You obviously recognize that because remember how your British trade unions acting in conjunction with their mates in the Attlee Government of 1945-51 nationalized the railways and road transport systems of the UK to form British Rail and British Road Services. Remember the chaos which ensued and how both had to be dismembered because of their inefficiency?
You for once George have got it right – allow free private enterprise in Cuba and by so doing, improve services at a lower cost.
“It would really be much more useful to design an application for employees of Correos de Cuba that would allow a faster delivery process.” This is exactly what the Cuban government should be investing in, and not only for the postal service, for food distribution and other logistical applications. If Cuba is doing deals with Google, it should get Google to build such cybernetic infrastructure for logistics as a priority, over and above connecting to the world wide web.
Yes, the Correos de Cuba provides a demonstration of the general incompetence of Cuban socialist systems. A letter posted in Canada on August 26th with a single photograph enclosed, was delivered in Cuba on December 31st. It had been opened by customs.
Of 6 postcards posted in Cuba to addresses in Canada, 4 were eventually delivered taking up to two months.
The Correos de Cuba has however during the last year had time to take down the pictures of Raul Castro as dictator wearing his military garb and replaced them with ones of him projecting the new statesman image – smart suits and silk ties.
My wife and I send a care package every month to her family in Guantanamo via DHL because the Correos de Cuba is a disaster. It’s a lot more expensive and much more dependable. It’s a shame that a country so dependent on receiving outside help is so inept at getting packages from outside the country.