A Cuban content creator posted a TikTok video that summarizes in 50 seconds the economic absurdity that Cubans face daily: receiving more than 200,000 Cuban pesos entirely in 10 peso bills, an amount that in informal exchange is worth just about 384 dollars.
José Luis Llanes Matos, known on TikTok as @motollanes, posted the clip on April 6, where he can be seen counting the bills out loud while joking, "Look over there, they were robbed at the bank... there's not that much money at the store, nor at the bank either."
The joke has a crushing logic: a payment of 200,000 pesos in 10 CUP bills means physically handling 20,000 bills, a bundle weighing several kilograms of banknotes that, in real terms, is not enough to cover basic expenses for a month.
The scene is not an isolated case. Cuban state banks continue to distribute salaries and payments in low-denomination bills due to a lack of higher-value currency, a practice that private businesses themselves reject by refusing to accept five, ten, and twenty peso bills.
The rejection has reached the point that self-employed workers in Havana only accept bills of 100 CUP or higher, leaving those who have smaller denominations with no practical way to spend their money.
The background is the brutal devaluation of the Cuban peso, which has lost more than 95% of its value against the dollar between 2020 and 2026, rising from 42 pesos per dollar to over 520 pesos per dollar in the informal market. In March, a Cuban educator reported having waited four days in line to collect 2,000 pesos in five and ten peso bills, describing the situation as "humiliating."
As a delayed response, the Central Bank of Cuba began issuing new 2,000 and 5,000 peso bills starting April 1. However, the new high denomination bills hardly solve the problem: a 5,000 CUP bill is equivalent to about ten dollars at the informal exchange rate, which has led Cubans to ironically say, "my salary in a bill."
The Central Bank itself justified the measure as a way to "facilitate transactions, address price increases, reduce logistical costs, and expedite operations," although the institution admitted that the new banknotes do not address a structural solution to the monetary crisis.
The video by @motollanes has garnered over 111,200 views and has been shared more than 1,100 times, becoming one of the most viral depictions of the Cuban economic collapse—a collapse that has been brewing for decades under 67 years of dictatorship and cannot be masked by any new bill, no matter how high its denomination.
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