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The provincial authorities of Guantánamo called an emergency meeting this Saturday with all their municipalities to demand an urgent increase in cash deposits in banks, the only means the regime identifies to cover salaries for the education sector and pensions for retirees in July.
The session, held via audioconference and presided over by the highest authorities of the Communist Party and the provincial government, set a daily fundraising target of nearly 15 million pesos in cash for the entire province, reported the official newspaper Venceremos.
The data presented at the meeting reveals that the branches of the Popular Savings Bank (BPA) only reach 94% of that target, while those of the Bank of Credit and Commerce (Bandec) only achieve 77%, with just over 12 million pesos collected between the two institutions.
This gap of at least three million pesos daily directly jeopardizes the payment of salaries and pensions throughout the month, in a province where—like the rest of the country—cash mainly circulates outside the formal banking system.
The situation is not exclusive to Guantánamo. In June, the government of Granma publicly acknowledged that it did not have the more than 400 million pesos needed to pay its 111,000 retirees, which led to the adoption of a staggered payment scheme based on the daily income of each branch.
In response to the crisis, the Central Bank itself instructed the nationwide extension of a pilot program initiated in Holguín, where around 20 small and medium enterprises began to pay pensions in cash directly to retirees, benefiting nearly 5,000 pensioners.
The background is the failure of the mandatory banking policy launched in August 2023. Three years later, only 3.77% of transactions in Cuba are digital, more than 50% of ATMs in Havana were out of service in May, and the newspaper Venceremos itself acknowledged the day before that the crisis "has ceased to be a banking difficulty and has become a social problem."
In the same meeting this Saturday, the authorities of Guantánamo addressed other critical issues such as the failure to meet the commercial circulation plan in the trading companies of Baracoa, Manuel Tames, San Antonio del Sur, and Imías, as well as the ongoing deterioration of electrical transformers, which affects both the state sector and residential areas.
Cuba has over 1.7 million retirees who rely on a collapsed banking system, with maximum pensions of 4,000 pesos per month, equivalent to less than 10 dollars at the informal exchange rate
For its part, the National Assembly approved in June a package of 176 measures that includes, for the first time since 1959, the authorization of private banking, reforms that analysts consider delayed in light of the magnitude of the collapse.
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