A video recorded this Friday in Marianao shows a dense crowd in front of a bank trying to withdraw cash, a new evidence of the failure of monetary "ordering" in Cuba and the severe shortage of cash in ATMs.
The images, without audio, were shared on Facebook by the user José Díaz Silva, who located the scene at a bank in that Havana municipality on Friday, November 21, with a line so long that it spills over the sidewalk and occupies the street.
In the clip, more than a hundred people can be seen gathered, waiting to withdraw their own money, in a scene that has become commonplace throughout the country and that contradicts the official narrative about the "orderly" progress of the banking process.
What the government considers a "necessary transformation" of the financial system has turned into an obstacle course for many Cubans, with banks lacking cash, broken or empty ATMs, and withdrawal limits that change from one day to the next.
In practice, forced banking overlaps with uncontrollable inflation and a chronic shortage of cash pesos, making bank accounts almost useless for those who cannot convert their money into bills to survive day by day.
The situation in Marianao aligns with repeated reports of endless lines and customers spending hours without being able to withdraw even a portion of their balance, as branches impose increasingly lower limits or claim that "there is no cash at the counter."
In a context of devalued salaries and rising prices, the inability to access one's own money enhances social discontent and feeds the discrediting of a banking system perceived as opaque, inefficient, and more attentive to the state's urgencies than to the needs of its citizens.
At the same time, the country is experiencing a de facto dollarization that pushes Cubans towards foreign currencies, while stores accepting freely convertible currency stock a significant portion of basic goods and penalize those who only earn in pesos.
The combination of inflation, cash shortages, and the official preference for foreign currencies has driven up the informal currency market, where the Cuban peso is plummeting much faster than the official rate of the Central Bank.
The failed "monetary reform," presented as the grand reform to regulate prices, salaries, and exchange rates, ended up exacerbating imbalances, as prices surged far above incomes and the gap deepened between those who have access to dollars and those who rely solely on state wages.
Four years later, the country is experiencing an inflationary spiral, a financial system lacking sufficient liquidity, and banks that, as shown in the Marianao video, are unable to even guarantee normal cash withdrawals for their own clients.
The crisis impacts not only ordinary Cubans but also family remittances that are caught in a bureaucratic maze and lack of liquidity, with beneficiaries waiting weeks or even months to receive transfers that should arrive in a matter of days.
While the regime tries to blame informal money transfer networks and private operators for the outflow of foreign currency, the reality is that many users prefer these channels precisely because they distrust a state banking system that doesn’t always deliver what it receives.
In parallel, the authorities have launched a political and media campaign against the independent outlet El Toque, which they accuse of "sabotaging" the Cuban economy by publishing the exchange rate of the informal market.
However, scenes like those at the bank in Marianao show that the root of the financial chaos does not lie in a website, but in an economic model that is unable to guarantee monetary stability, trust in the banking system, or basic access to cash.
While official media focus their attacks on critical platforms and informal exchange networks, the daily life of Cubans continues to be marked by queues at dawn, arbitrary withdrawal limits, and the feeling of living in a country where even accessing money from the bank is not guaranteed.
The video from Marianao thus adds to a long list of evidence that banking as it is being implemented in Cuba does not modernize the economy; rather, it exposes it as a system on the brink of collapse, propped up by bills that are almost never where they should be.
Filed under:
