The Cuban dictatorship has introduced a law to seize foreign currency from e-commerce

The Cuban Council of Ministers published on February 25, 2026, in the Official Gazette the Agreement 10216, a regulation that targets all e-commerce platforms operating with foreign currency payments. Although it was adopted on August 27, 2025, the regime waited six months to make it public, a delay that on its own reveals the political calculation behind the measure.

This agreement is, for many entrepreneurs, a desperate shot by the government against small and medium-sized enterprises, just when the private sector had become the only vessel still sailing in the midst of the shipwreck of the Cuban economy.

Platforms such as SuperMarket23, Cuballama, Cubamax, DimeCuba, Cubatel Market, MallHabana, EnviosCuba, CompreMarket, and more than a dozen similar stores that allow the Cuban diaspora to send food, medicine, and basic products to their families on the island are now under the direct threat of this regulatory framework.

What the Agreement 10216 really seeks

Behind the bureaucratic language, the objective is clear: to capture the foreign currency flowing through e-commerce that currently evades the direct control of the Cuban state.

The Agreement establishes that the Central Bank of Cuba will decide who can receive payments from abroad, giving the regime a switch over who operates and who does not. It requires all platforms to register with state registries, submit to total fiscal oversight, and register their systems with the Ministry of Communications. However, the most revealing point is the requirement that the income from e-commerce be "routed as a priority to accounts in Cuban banks." In other words, the dictatorship wants every dollar that the diaspora spends to support their families to pass through their hands first.

Moreover, the Agreement directly prohibits the sale of goods to foreign entities for them to market to beneficiaries in Cuba, directly targeting the business model of most platforms operating from outside the island, which is precisely where the trust of the Cuban consumer in exile resides.

And as a final point, taxes must be paid in foreign currency, not in Cuban pesos. The regime does not want its cut in devalued national currency; it wants dollars.

The proof that online stores are not part of the regime

For years, the argument has circulated that these platforms are businesses of the regime or disguised frontmen. This Agreement completely dismantles that narrative.

If these stores were owned by the State or under its control, this regulation would not exist. There would be no need to require them to register with multiple government agencies, to open their books to the tax authorities, or to comply with cybersecurity regulations from the Ministry of the Interior. They would already be integrated into the state apparatus.

What Agreement 10216 demonstrates is that the dictatorship is observing how a significant flow of foreign currency was circulating through channels it does not control. And that became intolerable for them.

The legal absurdity: complying with Havana may violate the law in the United States

Agreement 10216 presents a contradiction that borders on the absurd and could render it a dead letter for the platforms operating from the United States — which are the majority.

The regulations of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury prohibit any individual or company under U.S. jurisdiction from conducting financial transactions that benefit the Cuban government, its armed forces, or entities linked to the state apparatus. GAESA, CIMEX, and FINCIMEX— the military conglomerate that controls a significant part of the Cuban economy—are listed on the restricted entities list of the Department of State, reinstated by the Trump administration in January 2025 with 237 entities. The Central Bank of Cuba is, by definition, a government institution.

And the current context makes the contradiction even more glaring. Since its return to power, the Trump administration has drastically intensified sanctions against Cuba: it redesignated the island as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, reissued the NSPM-5 presidential memorandum that expands restrictions on military and governmental entities, and in January 2026 declared a national emergency regarding Cuba through Executive Order 14380. Washington is applying maximum pressure on the Cuban regime.

In this scenario, what Agreement 10216 requires — channeling e-commerce revenues into the Cuban state banking system and subjecting itself to the authorization of the Central Bank — could constitute a direct violation of the U.S. sanctions. The penalties for non-compliance with OFAC are significant: up to 10 years in prison, fines of up to one million dollars for companies, and 250,000 dollars for individuals.

The policy of the United States has been consistent in one regard, whether under Democratic or Republican administrations: authorized transactions must benefit the independent private sector in Cuba, not the state apparatus. Agreement 10216 aims to do exactly the opposite.

But the problem is not limited to trade sanctions. The Agreement requires platforms to provide the Cuban tax administration with "informational, access, and supervision mechanisms" regarding their operations, and to comply with cybersecurity regulations set forth by the Ministry of the Interior — MININT, the repressive apparatus of the dictatorship. In practice, this means handing over to a State designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism data on financial transactions, personal information of U.S. customers (names, addresses, purchase amounts), and access to internal systems of the platforms. For a company based in Miami, this could violate not only OFAC regulations but also federal and state laws on data protection and consumer privacy, including Florida's privacy legislation.

In practice, the regime is asking companies with accounts in U.S. banks and customers who pay with Visa and Mastercard to funnel money into the Cuban state's coffers and provide their databases. Complying with Havana would mean violating the law in Washington. The platforms would be forced to choose between submitting to the dictatorship and facing federal sanctions, or ignoring the Agreement and risking their ability to operate within Cuba.

Possible violations of the laws of third countries

The implementation of Agreement 10216 would not only conflict with U.S. legislation. Several e-commerce platforms serving the Cuban diaspora operate from Europe—particularly from Spain—and have users in multiple jurisdictions. For these companies, complying with the demands from Havana could lead to a chain of legal violations.

In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) prohibits the transfer of personal data to third countries that do not ensure an adequate level of protection. Cuba does not have an adequacy decision from the European Commission — nor could it remotely obtain one, as the criteria require respect for the rule of law, human rights, and the existence of independent supervisory authorities. Transferring European user data to the Cuban Ministry of the Interior or to the tax administration of the dictatorship would constitute an illegal transfer of personal data under the GDPR, with fines that can reach up to 20 million euros or 4% of the company's global turnover.

The aggravating factor is that the Agreement does not request data from any organization: it is required by MININT through its cybersecurity regulations and the tax administration of the regime. Providing "informational, access, and oversight mechanisms" to the political police of a dictatorship goes beyond a regulatory compliance issue; it directly jeopardizes the safety of users. A Cuban on the island who receives shipments from abroad, an exile who regularly buys for their family — all would be exposed to an intelligence apparatus that pursues and incarcerates dissenters.

For platforms operating in Canada, federal privacy laws (PIPEDA) impose similar restrictions on international data transfers. In any jurisdiction with a minimum data protection framework, the Cuban requirement poses the same problem: a government without guarantees of fundamental rights, lacking independent oversight, and with a documented history of political repression cannot be a legitimate recipient of personal data from foreign citizens.

The regime lost this business due to its incompetence

It is worth remembering how we got here. The foreign currency stores (the former TRD, Cimex, Panamericana) were, for decades, the Cuban state's monopoly for capturing the remittances from the diaspora. The business model was foolproof: families abroad would send dollars, and the government sold imported products with huge profit margins through its state-run chains.

But the regime was unable to sustain that business. State-owned stores in MLC (Freely Convertible Currency) turned into a fiasco: empty shelves, poor-quality products, inflated prices, and deplorable service. The chronic inability of the Cuban State to manage a basic supply chain led the diaspora to seek alternatives. They found them in e-commerce platforms operated by Cuban entrepreneurs, many of them small and medium-sized enterprises, who achieved what the State could not: providing quality products at better prices and reliable deliveries.

Now the dictatorship resorts to the only thing it knows how to do: legislate to control, prohibit, and extract value from the labor of others. It wants to forcibly reclaim what it lost due to its own incompetence.

What’s coming

The Agreement comes into effect 60 days after its publication, that is, around April 26, 2026. Those who are already operating will have an additional 30 days to comply with the new requirements once the Central Bank issues the supplementary provisions.

The big question is whether the platforms operating from abroad will comply with these requirements or if they will seek ways to continue operating outside of state control.

The desperation behind the law

This Agreement cannot be understood in isolation. It must be read in the context of a regime that is running out of economic oxygen. The subsidized oil supply from Venezuela — for two decades the energy lifeline of the dictatorship — has plummeted to critical levels, to the point that Cuba has had to suspend fuel resupply at its own airports. Tourism, the other historical source of foreign currency, is in freefall: the ongoing energy crisis, insecurity, infrastructure deterioration, and travel restrictions imposed by Washington have driven away visitors. Exports are minimal. Foreign investment is nonexistent.

In that suffocating scenario, the regime looks to the only flow of foreign currency that still operates—the money that the diaspora sends through e-commerce to feed their families—and its response is not to facilitate that ecosystem but to try to capture it. It's the reaction of a government that does not know how to generate wealth, only to confiscate it.

The problem of Cuba cannot be resolved with another agreement in the Official Gazette. As long as GAESA — the business conglomerate of the Armed Forces that controls tourism, imports, remittances, retail, and entire sectors of the economy — holds the reins of the country, there is no possible solution. GAESA is not just an economic player: it is the mechanism through which the military elite extracts wealth from every transaction that occurs in Cuba, from the hotel where a tourist sleeps to the package of chicken that an exile buys for their mother.

No economic reform can succeed when the very apparatus that should drive it is the main beneficiary of the system that hinders it. Any real solution for Cuba inevitably involves dismantling GAESA. Until that happens, measures such as Agreement 10216 will continue to be what they have always been: desperate attempts by an incapable dictatorship trying to wrest away the little that works in the Cuban economy from the private sector.