Move over Revolico.com, Here's Cubisima.com

CUBISIMA.COM

El Yuma recently received the following announcement from a long-time Cuban friend who asked that I share it with my readers.  I have taken the liberty of translating it into English and provided hyperlinks to the mentioned pages and services.  I will see if I can get one of my fellow Spanish language bloggers to post the Spanish version of the announcement.

Cubisima was officially created in 2001. At that time, its central objective was to aid Cuba’s insipient on-line community in finding housing swaps (known in Cuba as “permutas”).

Little by little, and with the incremental growth of internet connectivity on the island, the site has been gaining popularity - above all in the area of these housing swaps (a peculiar process of exchanging housing unique to Cuba that tends to be rather long and complicated).

The site is also home to other important areas such as Classifieds (Compraventa), Friendship (Amistades), Employment (Empleos), Diversions (Farándula), Contests (Concursos), and World Wide Web access via e-mail (wwwporcorreo). Currently, the most visited sections of the site are Classifieds, Housing Swaps, and our Webmail service.

The site enjoys great acceptance among its users with an average of 1,500 visits per day, and an active community on its Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/cubisima/161610907179.

Being that its primary aim is to aid Cubans with effective network solutions, Cubisima.com has always tried to maintain a sense of ethics in its content by making sure that its announcements are as reliable as possible.

Classifieds (Compraventa)

In this section, Cubans can publish any classified announcement or type of services they wish. For example, it is common to find announcements for the sale of computers or spare computer parts or even an announcement offering daycare.

The browser for this section is quite simple and recently we made some upgrades in order to provide the most accurate information possible. Still, users still can perform a more advanced search by entering each of the provided categories. These kind of sties represent a radical change in the lives of Cubans given that now before looking at the price of a certain product in a hard currency store or through a third party, people use Cubisima.com as a way to compare prices in the parallel market (the unofficial market).

Housing Swaps (Permutas)

Our Housing Swap section is the initial reason we launched the site in the first place. Housing Swaps are the process Cubans have to go through in order to move or change houses given that the buying and selling of housing remains prohibited on the island. Unlike in the rest of the world, where there are brokers, realtors, and a housing market driven by price], the process of house swapping in Cuba has special characteristics that make it difficult for outsiders to understand and especially complex to automate on-line.

There are various kinds of possible housing swaps: 1x1, 1x2, 2x1, 2x2, etc. The number before the x represents the number of houses/apartments that are being offered in the swap and number following the x represents the number of houses/apartments that are needed.

Of course, our system of housing swaps attempts to provide users with a list of the housing stock currently up for trade and that match up with the specific characteristics of the kind of housing they are looking for, taking into account parameters such as the number of bathrooms, bedrooms, etc. desired.

Webmail (WWWporCorreo)

This is a unique service exclusively provided by us on our site. It provides users in Cuba the possibility of navigating the web without the need for an internet connection. In other words, if you live in Cuba and have an e-mail address ending in “.cu” you can use our service to visit different web pages.

All you need to do is send an e-mail message to www@cubisima.com and write the URL of the page you want to visit in the subject line. Within a few seconds you will receive an e-mail with the requested information.

This service is already used by thousands of people in our country and has won a great following especially among research centers that normally do not have access to the world wide web.

In conclusion, our site is taking the reigns of the classified market on the island left after the blocking of revolico.com. We intend to constantly improve the functioning of our site hoping to become the leading classified site in the country.