The Guantánamo Municipal Administration Council fined several small and medium-sized enterprises, non-agricultural cooperatives, and self-employed workers this week for refusing to accept online payments, and closed down a business due to repeat offenses and for employing workers in irregular conditions.
The sanctioned establishments were the non-agricultural cooperative Los Girasoles, Placita La Chirimolla—located at Narciso López corner with Máximo Gómez—, Mercado La Punta, and the Central Mail Unit.
Similarly, the Fénix business was permanently shut down for repeatedly failing to comply with digital payment gateways and for employing illegal workers, as specified in a report on Facebook from the official profile Mi Guantánamo.
The statement from the Guantánamo Municipal Administration Council left no room for interpretation: "Banking is mandatory, not optional. Economic discipline ensures transparency and trust. The people must be respected."
This week's action is part of a sustained offensive that the municipality has been carrying out for months. On August 28, the authorities imposed 29 fines in a single day, totaling 198,360 Cuban pesos, after inspecting 51 economic actors, and closed four repeat offender establishments.
On the same day, six citizen complaints were recorded, mostly concerning the rejection of the use of Transfermóvil or EnZona.
At the beginning of August, the municipal director of Supervision and Inspection of the El Salvador municipality, Mariela Rodríguez Hernández, warned that there is no leeway for those who fail to comply with the obligation.
"The rule is clear: all self-employed workers are required to accept online payment for all their products and services. There is no middle ground."
The underlying paradox is that the provincial government itself acknowledged in July that the banking system does not have the capacity to sustain the policy it imposes. At that time, Bandec was capturing just over 35% of the nearly 15 million pesos it needs to operate daily.
The official newspaper Venceremos has admitted that the crisis "has stopped being a banking difficulty and has become a social problem."
The contradiction becomes even more pronounced when it is noted that 113 private businesses in the province are handling pension payments in cash for over 3,000 retirees, precisely because the banking system cannot guarantee that service.
The government, unable to bank its own operations, demands that private merchants digitize theirs under the threat of fines and closures.
On a national scale, the assessment of three years of mandatory banking, imposed by Resolution 111/2023 of the Central Bank, is telling: less than four percent of transactions in Cuba are digital, despite over 15,240 fines and 269 closures of establishments throughout the country.
The economist Elías Amor summarized the situation straightforwardly: "This is just another one of the many occurrences from the Castro regime, which then go wrong and they blame the blockade and the embargo for what goes wrong."
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