A fight about to break out in line at a bank in Havana and a passionate denunciation against the regime: this is what a video posted on Facebook by Cuban activist Silverio Portal shows, recorded this week and summarizing in just over two minutes the frustration of a population that can no longer endure.
In the footage, Portal walks along a long line in front of a bank branch while narrating the situation with indignation: "There is no money, there is nothing, this is lost, as the whole world knows, the Eskimos already know this too."
At one point during the wait, a heated argument can be heard among people in line: “Don’t touch me,” says one person while another tries to calm things down: “Take it easy.” The physical tension among those waiting reflects the level of desperation these queues generate, which often last for hours with no guarantee of cash at the end.
At the end of the tour, Portal points to a poster he is holding, one of the millions printed by the Cuban regime over the decades, and makes a direct accusation: “Look at this... a man who led a nation to ruin.” He concludes, “This is the culprit.” The face on the poster is a smiling Fidel Castro, accompanied by the phrase: “For Cuba, united, we will overcome.” The country's downfall illustrates just how much has been overcome.
The situation depicted in the reel is not an isolated incident. Since August 2023, the regime has imposed limits on cash withdrawals at ATMs, capped at 5,000 pesos per transaction, without resolving the shortage of physical money in the system. The result is an unsustainable contradiction: the government forces citizens to use banks, yet the banks have no money to provide to them.
In April 2026, the EFE agency reported wait times of four to six hours at banks in Havana, mostly involving retirees trying to collect their pensions, which in the informal market amount to less than 10 dollars a month. In Holguín, dozens of elderly people have been lining up since five in the morning to collect their meager payments.
The minimum pension has been set at 4,000 Cuban pesos starting from September 2025, according to the . This is in the face of a cost of living that various analysts estimate to be above 35,000 pesos per month. A survey by the Independent Trade Union Association of Cuba in 2025 revealed that 99% of 506 retirees surveyed in five provinces stated that their pension is insufficient for food.
The Cuban elderly who believed in the revolution are the ones suffering the most from this crisis. Every month, the monthly payment in Cuba consists of elderly people in long lines to receive a pension that barely covers a week's worth of food.
The collapse has structural causes that have accumulated over decades: blackouts lasting up to twenty, thirty, and forty hours a day that incapacitate ATMs and digital platforms, outdated equipment, lack of internet connectivity, and a growing citizen distrust towards enforced banking. In July 2025, the Banco Metropolitano acknowledged a "cash shortage" and the deterioration of its ATM network. In December of that year, it denied remittances to customers citing "lack of cash", and in November, a "human tide" of more than a hundred people gathered in front of a bank in Marianao, highlighting the collapse.
Due to the system's inability to dispense cash at the counter, the Central Bank has launched a pilot program to pay pensions at private establishments that accumulate cash, a measure that implicitly acknowledges the failure of the state system. Meanwhile, Cubans across the country continue to wonder, as noted in a recent report, who turned withdrawing one's own money from a bank into an extraordinarily difficult process.
The video from Portal, recorded in June 2026, is the latest expression of a crisis that, according to a Cuban intellectual cited this week, has reached the point where "there are people dying from starvation" on the island.
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