The economist Elías Amor warns that the proposal from the Central Bank of Cuba that pushes Mipymes to advance pension payments in cash contains a financial and political trap that could destroy private businesses when funds run short.
The analysis arises from a conversation with Tania Costa in which Amor dissects the specific risks of the mechanism approved by the BCC: businesses hand over the cash from their sales to the retirees in their area and then await reimbursement from the state.
"The first risk it poses is the delay in that reimbursement. What happens if three months go by, four months go by, and the bank doesn't pay me? Do I stop paying the pensioner? Do I keep paying the pensioner? How do we manage this?" Costa asked the economist.
The second scenario is even more explosive: the retiree arrives on the first day of the month to collect their pension, and the business lacks sufficient funds due to having low sales the day before.
"Just imagine that a retiree arrives on the 1st to collect their pension, and it turns out that you've had a poor day selling food. Not every day is the same in a business. Those who have a private venture know that one day they earn X, and the next day they earn X divided by 3 because that's how private activity works," he pointed out.
In Amor's opinion, the owner would then have to tell the retirees that he cannot pay them, and those elderly individuals would go to protest in front of the neighborhood Communist Party delegate.
"Those elderly people are going to go protest to the neighborhood communist delegate and they are going to say to him: 'Look, Tania hasn't paid us the pension because she claims she doesn't have any money,'" she illustrated using the name of the presenter.
According to the economist, the regime's response would be immediate and punitive: "Look, we're going to temporarily shut down your business so you can understand who we are. And that's going to happen because the communists don't want people to make money."
Amor argues that the regime will use any breach to eliminate businesses. "What they are interested in is ending private initiative, and when a private business is like a bull that has been struck down and is lying on the ground, the communist comes in to deliver the final blow because what they want is to put an end to that business."
It also dismantles the official justification, which presents the elimination of banking lines as its main objective. "What concerns the bank director the most is more than the queue and the crowding —which has been going on for years— that situations of social outburst could now occur."
The most serious warning points to the future: "The day I can no longer pay, the regime shifts that responsibility to the Mipymes."
This scheme is framed within a liquidity crisis that already led the Granma government to admit in June that it did not have the more than 400 million pesos needed to pay its 111,000 retirees that month, while in Havana and Santiago de Cuba, lines of four to six hours were reported in front of the banks.
The pilot program started in April 2026 in four municipalities of Havana and expanded in May to Holguín, where around 20 Mipymes began paying pensions to nearly 5,000 retirees. On July 17, the BCC included it in a package of 176 emergency economic measures that also includes the issuance of new bills of 2,000 and 5,000 pesos.
Love leaves no room for ambiguity: "The first thing I propose is to immediately put an end to this madness. This is just another one of the many ideas from the Castro regime that end up failing, and then they blame the blockade and the embargo for what goes wrong."
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