Cuban diaspora turns online delivery services into lifeline for families
Diaspora buyers can send beans, chicken and cooking oil straight to Havana, turning apps like Supermarket23 into a survival line. Fuel shortages have made that lifeline shaky.
In Louisville, Carmen Deulofeu can feed her sister in Havana with a few clicks, ordering beans, chicken, powdered milk and cooking oil through Supermarket23. The platform is one of several nicknamed Cuban Amazons, and for families locked into Cuba’s shortages, it has become a substitute supply chain rather than a convenience.
Cash transfers do not always buy food on the island, but online orders can put physical goods into a relative’s hands. Through Supermarket23, Cuballama, Mercatoria and Katapulk, diaspora Cubans can send staples that routinely disappear from local shelves or cost far more than most wages can cover, including eggs, sugar, coffee, soap, shampoo and detergent. In Deulofeu’s case, the pressure has become so acute that her sister, a retired optometrist in Havana, broke into tears over the phone asking for more help.
Food is exempt from the U.S. embargo, which allows merchants to ship groceries and household goods from the United States or other countries for delivery on the island. Relatives abroad pay, the platforms source the goods, and someone in Cuba waits for the delivery instead of joining the hunt for empty or overpriced stores.
More than 2.6 million Cubans have left since 2020, creating a large overseas network that now props up households on the island with both cash and goods. That network grew after Cuba began opening mobile internet in 2018. In July of that year, Reuters said the government had started rolling out mobile access to selected users and planned broader access by year’s end, while CNBC said in December 2018 that the state telecom firm had begun 3G service even as data prices remained high relative to average take-home pay of about $30.
Cuba has faced severe blackouts, with some outages lasting up to 18 hours a day in 2024 and many Cubans in Havana later seeing 16 or more hours without power before another grid collapse. Protests in Santiago de Cuba broke out over chronic blackouts and food shortages. By the end of 2023, the National Office of Statistics and Information put Cuba’s effective population at 10,055,968, and the country slipped below 10 million in 2024. In February 2026, Supermarket23 temporarily suspended new orders because fuel shortages had made logistics harder.
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