Dozens of elderly Cubans must stand in long lines to collect their checks in cash, due to the inefficiency of the island's banks, whose services are constantly disrupted by power outages.
A video posted on Facebook by the page "Ayer y Hoy" titled "Nuestro Santiago de Cuba" shows a reality that repeats itself every month across the island: Cuban retirees must wake up early, wait in line for hours, or even spend the night on the sidewalk to collect a pension that in 2026 amounts to less than 10 dollars a month.
The minimum pension in Cuba is 4,000 Cuban pesos since September 2025, when the regime raised it from the previous 1,528 pesos.
However, at the informal exchange rate in June 2026—around 545 pesos per dollar—those 4,000 pesos amount to only about seven to eight dollars a month, while the basic food basket in Havana is around 30,000 pesos per person, eight times more than what a retiree receives.
The human drama is especially evident in Santiago de Cuba, where elderly individuals up to 80 years old start lining up at six in the evening the day before in an attempt to collect their pensions at dawn the following day.
At the corner of Garzón and Third Street, in the Santa Bárbara neighborhood, people spend the night on the sidewalk. The presence of "coleros" selling spots leads to pushes and arguments among elderly individuals with limited mobility.
The crisis is not exclusive to Santiago. The provincial government of Granma admitted on June 17 that it does not have enough cash to pay its more than 111,000 retirees, as it is unable to gather the more than 400 million pesos needed for the monthly payment.
"It has not been possible to reach the more than 400 million pesos in cash that are required," acknowledged the Provincial Commission for Social Security Attention of that province.
In Havana, more than 50% of the ATMs have stopped functioning, decreasing from over 500 operational machines to just 200, victims of power outages and a shortage of cash. In Camagüey and other provinces, many Cubans can only withdraw 500 pesos per month, and the ATMs remain empty for weeks.
Since August 2023, there has also been a withdrawal limit of 5,000 pesos per transaction, which requires multiple visits to collect a full pension.
Authorities attribute the lack of cash to private businesses not fulfilling deposit contracts with banks and the widespread rejection of electronic payments. The official newspaper Granma, the organ of the Communist Party, acknowledged on June 18 that “reality imposes urgent and necessary changes on us”, an unusual admission of the banking collapse.
The structural problem is even deeper. Cuba is the oldest country in Latin America: by the end of 2024, 25.7% of its population will be 60 years old or older.
The massive emigration of young people—between 40,000 and 44,000 individuals per year—reduces the active workforce that supports the social security system, while the number of beneficiaries continues to grow. Between 2021 and 2023, the population aged 15 to 59 fell by nearly 12%.
The image of an elderly man waiting in line since the previous afternoon to collect seven dollars a month, in a country where forty years of work translate into a pension that barely lasts a week, encapsulates decades of failure of a system that promised to protect its citizens and has left them sleeping on the pavement to survive.
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