A video posted on Facebook by Cuban activist Silverio Portal unfilteredly reveals the scene that repeats every day in front of the Metropolitan Bank on O'Reilly and Compostela, in the heart of Old Havana: an endless line of people under the scorching sun, with visibly exhausted elderly individuals, waiting to access their own money.
In the images, Portal pans the camera over the line in front of the bank and points toward a hotel that opened two years ago right next door, completely empty due to the lack of tourists.
"The hotel is there and they built it, but it doesn't work because there's no tourism," says the activist, summarizing in one image the regime's double failure: million-dollar investments with no return and citizens who can't withdraw their pensions.
"Let you see how the bank is doing. Look, older people of the highest age, see how it is here," adds Portal.
The video shows a crowd in front of the building, some stationed on the opposite sidewalk trying to escape the sun, and others sitting on doorsteps, all waiting with concern and discomfort for their moment to enter.
Silverio concludes with a statement that summarizes everything: "How Cuba is. How the system is. Down on the floor, stuck inside a tank of shit."
This same bank has been at the center of multiple crises in recent weeks: in June, its staff intentionally disabled the ATMs to prevent crowding, which sparked widespread outrage, and at the end of that month indefinitely suspended appointment reservations on the MiTurno and Ticket platforms, citing power outages.
On July 14, another viral video showed Cubans fighting since dawn in front of the same branch to withdraw cash, in a scene that portrayed the chaos of bank queues in Havana.
What the video shows is not an exception, but the norm.
The crisis is spreading throughout the Island. On July 17 and 18, the Banco Popular de Ahorro de Holguín closed its doors at 3:00 pm leaving dozens of retirees unable to collect their payments, despite having electricity, cash, and internet connection.
“If it was bad on Wednesday to collect the retirement pension in the city of Holguín… today, Friday, it’s even worse. What has changed? NOTHING,” denounced the user Pedro Lorenzo Hechavarría Pupo on Facebook.
In Havana, retired journalist of the Granma newspaper, Iraida Calzadilla, recounted having spent eight hours sitting on the edge of the sidewalk of a Havana bank to collect her pension. "Eight divine, hot, overwhelming, and frustrating hours waiting in line at the bank," she wrote. "Days of terror without any real solutions."
The photojournalist from Granma, Ricardo López Hevia, described what he witnessed at the Bank of Monaco in Diez de Octubre: "I saw people shouting, crying out of desperation, I saw baton blows and accusations shouted loudly, and chaos of every kind. No one to control it, nor to guide the endless frenzied line to a good conclusion. The face of misery has nothing dignified."
Behind these scenes, there is a devastating structural crisis.
More than 1.7 million Cuban retirees depend on a collapsed banking system where the maximum pension is 4,000 pesos per month—less than seven dollars at the informal exchange rate—while the basic food basket exceeds 30,000 pesos.
More than 50% of the ATMs in the country are out of service or empty, and only 3.77% of transactions in Cuba are digital, despite three years of forced banking.
The official newspaper Venceremos from Guantánamo acknowledged on July 3 that the banking crisis "has ceased to be a banking difficulty and has turned into a social problem."
The Central Bank announced the national extension of pension payments through private businesses, an implicit recognition that the State can no longer sustain its own social security system. In Holguín, a similar pilot plan only reached 5,000 of the more than 52,000 retirees in the municipality, less than 10%.
Filed under: