Are Cubans genetically more prone to shoplifting?

“Sweetie, you can’t come in here with any bag or purse,” that’s what they keep telling Marisel Castañeda, a resident of Colon 25, in the city of Santa Clara.

Well, this is a typical scenario that occurs throughout the national territory, a humiliation to the customer caused by the lack of control or the purchase of modern equipment that guarantees security in the store chains of our country.

Here they prefer to pay us a salary and have us standing around uselessly all day instead of putting a tag on the things that are sold," Jaime García, one of the many doormen who stop us every day at the exit to check our purchases, tells us.

“We know it’s a very annoying thing and customers have told us a thousand things, but it’s not our fault, it’s our job!” asserts Jaime.

There are many solutions, few motivations and budgets," assures us Rubén Martínez, security specialist at Copextel in Villa Clara,...we sell tele cameras and closed-circuit television systems through the commercial distributor, as well as equipment to guarantee security in establishments. It is up to the chain of stores to request the service and purchase the equipment for which we guarantee installation and maintenance. It is simply easier to pay one person to check at the doors than to tag all the products.

The reality for Cubans is this, and making a certain purchase can be more cumbersome than you might imagine. "There is no market where you can go and buy everything; you have to go from store to store to see what you find, and when you buy something in one, then you can't enter the other with that bag, and if it's something valuable, you can't even leave it in the cloakroom, it just doesn't work like that," argues Anabel, Journalism Student.

Are Cubans genetically more prone to stealing from stores? Undoubtedly, there is no genetic conditioning that supports that criterion. Beyond the socioeconomic situation in which we live.

According to Yunesiy, a self-employed person who usually travels to Ecuador, "It is humiliating that, to enter Prague to have a coffee, they do not let you in with your bag, this only happens in Cuba," he states.

Since the decriminalization of the dollar in Cuba, the network of stores across the country has grown exponentially, with several chains such as TRD, Caracol, Cubalse, Panamericanas, etc. Various forms of control have been implemented throughout the island, including recently in Havana the security and control bags where belongings are transported. Without a doubt, we still have a long way to go before the day comes when you can make a purchase with complete peace of mind and move from one market to another with all your bags.