Cuban authorities have broken up a black market ring that operated out of a major Havana food store, a government news report said Sunday. Police officers arrested ``numerous hoarders and resellers of basic necessities,'' Prensa Latina, the official Cuban news agency, said in a report monitored in Mexico City. Employees of Mercado Amistad, Havana's largest grocery, were believed to have been involved in a scheme that allowed the illegal resale of large quantities of basic goods at inflated prices, Prensa Latina said. Also, some of those arrested allegedly ``sold places in (the grocery store) line to the highest bidder and in this way earned more than a worker,'' the report said. ``The scarcity of various products caused by distribution, organization, inefficiency and bureaucratic problems, plus the lack of foreign exchange, encourages the proliferation of speculators,'' Prensa Latina said. The market, where consumers often wait in long lines for scarce goods, is in the old Sears, Roebuck and Co. building that was nationalized after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Private enterprise has been all but eliminated on the communist island. Two years ago, the government ended experimental farmers' markets that had allowed growers to sell surpluses.
