Dozens of teachers and professors from District 1 José Martí in Santiago de Cuba have been waiting for hours this Saturday at the Teatro Heredia to withdraw their salaries in cash, according to a report by independent journalist Yosmany Mayeta Labrada.
A teacher who requested to protect her identity explained that the bank point established in that cultural venue experienced a connection interruption since Friday, which left the payment operations out of service.
At 10:00 AM this Saturday, the bank staff had not yet arrived at the location to provide explanations or offer solutions, according to the testimony received from Mayeta Labrada.
Photographs taken on-site at that hour show dozens of people waiting both inside and outside the Teatro Heredia, with some sitting on the floor as they passed the time.
The episode illustrates the dual crisis that Cuban teachers face: not only is receiving a salary uncertain, but converting it into cash has become a separate odyssey. "Getting paid is already difficult; being able to convert that salary into cash shouldn’t also turn into a day of uncertainty," wrote Mayeta Labrada when publishing the complaint.
The situation in Santiago de Cuba is not new. On September 3, just nine days before this incident, the ATMs at the city's train station were found covered in excrement, which was interpreted as a spontaneous protest against the lack of cash.
In previous months, some bank branches in the province only served about 50 retirees per day, forcing many to line up since the previous afternoon, while exchanging a transfer for cash could incur a fee of up to 50%.
The Central Bank issued Resolution 74/2026 in July, which removed the cap of 5,000 CUP for cash transactions among economic actors, but the measure did not address the structural liquidity shortage that the country is experiencing.
The education sector is also facing its own delays. The Resolution 18/2026 of the Ministry of Labor updated teacher salaries starting in July —ranging from 6,130 to 7,735 CUP monthly depending on the level of education— but payment issues persist in several provinces.
A teacher from Urbano Noris, Holguín, reported in August that she had not been paid since May, and in Camagüey, at least two months of back salaries for teachers were reported.
That accumulated exhaustion has direct consequences: the exodus of teachers left at the beginning of the 2026-2027 school year with a deficit of 24,000 vacant teaching positions across the country, a figure that reflects the collapse of a system that fails to retain those who support it.
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