18 THECUBAREVIEW 



HINTS FOR AMERICAN MERCHANTS 



HARDWARE, STATIONERY, OFFICE SUPPLIES, MOTOR BOATS, ETC,, IN 

 HAVANA INFORMATION ON CREDITS 



In the machinery and the hardware trades the situation in Havana is fairly well 

 understood by American manufacturers, for buyers here have been big customers of 

 ours for years. There are many launches of perhaps 30 feet in constant use in Havana 

 harbor and it would follow that there ought to be a fine market for motors and motor 

 boats, but it is not as yet. Some of the sporting and athletic clubs have imported 

 motor boats, and some of the hardware or machinery houses sell marine motors, but 

 there is no distinctive motor boat trade established and no dealers devoting their attention 

 to this line. 



The paper trade of Cuba, like that in stationery and office supplies generally, is also 

 thoroughly known and cultivated by manufacturer^ of the United States in all its 

 branches from the "news" to strawboard, from envelopes to paper bags. There is, how- 

 ever, what impresses me as an attractive opportunity^ in Havana for some enterprising 

 manufacturer of folding boxes, especially such boxes •^as are used by our laundries for 

 delivering shirts, and the cheaper, lighter weights of %he boxes utilized by tailors for 

 suits. Nothing of the sort is used in Havana, or Cuba, to-day and the claim is that 

 freights and heavy import duties bring costs out so high, as to forbid importations. But 

 I can learn of no one that has made a practical experiment. Meanwhile tailors and other 

 shopkeepers in Havana use wrapping paper and as little of 'it-as possible, and one of 

 the prominent tailoring establishments even went so far as to have a delivery wagon 

 built with a large number of drawers. On delivering -,ithe goods these drawers were 

 taken out, carried to the door or into the house, emptied and returned to their places 

 in the wagon, thus saving the cost of paper. | 



As in the case of motor boats, many automobiles have t|edn brought into Cuba directly 

 by their owners or through commission agents who h^Cye sold from^,. catalogue. An 

 anomalous state of affairs exists in the Havana automobilq trade. ; Any/ dealer or garage, 

 several commission agents, seem to be willing to order aiid import from catalogue any 

 kind of a machine for which a customer may express a preferente. Few of the dealers 

 have any "agencies," at least any to which they seem very firmly or devotedly attached. 

 It took me two hours one day to learn who is the Havana agent for one'of the very best 

 European cars, a machine of world-wide reputation. Not one of .the- garages, where I 

 inquired could tell me. Discovering the agent by chaince, I f ound ihim.to be' a well-known 

 machinery dealer, who acknowledged he had only sold two cars in two years, had not ■ 

 even a car of his own. Yet there are plenty of automobiles in Havana;: you will find ^ 

 sixty or seventy-five waiting for hire on the stand in Central -Park, every ,i day ; or drive 

 in late afternoon down the Prado and along Malecon will display hundreds. 



An enormous field undoubtedly exists for motor trucks in rthe sugar (estates — but the 

 task set them is a severe one, one that like matrimony is not^: lightly to be entered upon. 

 Many a great oxcart of the country has been stuck in the deep mud of ■ the _cane fields 

 and abandoned, more than a few traction engines have been mired despite various forms 

 of special equipment. However, the magnificent possibilities of the. business warrant 

 its serious study — and the sugar people have both the inclination and .the means to buy. 

 Much interest is also being shown in motor trucks for Havana. A number are already 

 in use, and the past two or three months have seen the arrival' of demonstration samples 

 from at least two American factories and one European. A word of advice must be 

 offered as to motor trucks for business purposes in Havana; the streets m the old parts 

 of the city, the principal business parts, above all the parts devoted to heavy wholesale 

 business, are exceedingly narrow and scores of them are not navigable by the ordmary 

 motor car which cannot negotiate the sharp street corners in the limited widths afiforded. 

 Exceptional short wheel base seems therefore to be indicated, as the diagnosticians say. 

 In athletic and sporting goods the Cuban capital is far and away the best customer 

 we have in all Latin-America. Baseball is firmly established both as a professional game 

 and as a sport ; tennis and golf are popular ; football, played by the college students, is 

 gaining in favor in other circles ; basket ball calls for supplies in the shops. 



Havana, the capital of Cuba, is, in popwlation, about the size of the capital of the 

 United States. But Havana is more than a political capital, it is the great commercial 

 capital and center of the whole Republic as well. Here are numberless great rich 

 wholesale importing houses whose agents reach the whole interior and even control a 

 good share of the trade of the more independent coast towns. Front the rich tobacco 

 fields of Pinar del Rio in the West to the great sugar plantations of the central province, 



