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The Popular Savings Bank (BPA) has started to gradually settle the foreign currency accounts that have been blocked for years, with particular priority given to Cuban doctors on missions, according to statements from a bank official in Sancti Spíritus.
Yeney Ceballo Hernández, head of the Personal Banking Department at BPA in that province, explained that starting in February 2025, a special program for this segment was initiated: "The collaborators are a sensitive and important segment for us, and they receive special treatment. Why? Because they are doctors working abroad, and many of them are the ones ensuring the foreign currency that is desperately needed in the country today."
Of the more than 100 collaborators registered in the BPA of Sancti Spíritus, more than 77% of the pending cases have already been paid.
The remaining 23% has not received payment because they are still abroad and return sporadically, not due to the bank's unwillingness, as the official clarified.
The reason for this priority is economic: the Cuban government has more than 24,000 healthcare workers in 56 nations, whose missions represent the main source of foreign currency for the State, although the regime retains about 85% of the salary paid by the host countries to each collaborating doctor.
For the remaining clients with blocked accounts, the BPA implemented a list of "unmet claims" organized by seniority: as foreign currency is deposited or received through other means, partial or total payments are made based on availability.
Ceballo Hernández noted that in the case of transfers received from abroad, nearly all outstanding issues have now been resolved: "There was a time when that list of transfers was huge; we couldn't even access paying 50 pesos. But now they are being processed, and almost all the pending transfers have been resolved."
Another way to alleviate the situation has been the floating exchange rate, which allows customers to convert their foreign currencies to Cuban pesos at the daily rate. "This floating rate has come to solve an old problem, where people had foreign currencies and could do nothing with them," explained the official.
This process occurs amid a profound currency crisis that Cuba has been experiencing since 2019, which intensified between 2023 and 2025. The dollar was traded at 395 Cuban pesos in the informal market in August 2025, and in May 2026, the official rate of Segment III places the dollar at 498 Cuban pesos.
The Central Bank accelerated the implementation of the floating rate since late 2024 as part of a strategy to attract external capital, and in March 2026 the regime announced that it would allow Cubans residing abroad to open accounts in foreign currency in banks on the island.
The accumulated debt with medical collaborators reflects a structural paradox of the system: the Cuban state depends on the foreign currency generated by these professionals, but for years it has prevented them from accessing the money they deposited in accounts that were frozen due to the financial crisis of the dictatorship.
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