Three years after the implementation of banking services, more than 31,000 retirees and pensioners in Guantánamo continue to visit bank branches each month to collect their pensions, acknowledged the official newspaper Venceremos this Friday.
The province has more than 49,600 retirees and pensioners, but only 18,582 (37% of the total) are enrolled in some form of payment alternative to the bank counter. These include services such as postal services, banking agents, and private businesses.
The remaining 63%, mostly elderly individuals, continue to rely on bank branches to receive their pensions. The challenges associated with this system include long lines, disputes, and mistreatment, as well as the illegal sale of queue numbers to seniors in order to access their payments, the media outlet acknowledged.
Resolution 111/2023 of the Central Bank of Cuba set limits on cash transactions and promoted the use of electronic channels for financial operations.
The president Miguel Díaz-Canel presented the measure as a way to "deeply modernize the country's banking and financial system," with the aim of having banks that are more agile, digital, and accessible to the public.
The numbers confirm the structural failure of the measure. According to a survey in May, less than 10% of SMEs and private workers in Sancti Spíritus accepted transfers as a regular payment method.
In Guantánamo, the liquidity crisis exacerbates the problem. The Banco de Crédito y Comercio (Bandec) in the province only manages to capture just over 34% of the nearly 15 million pesos it needs to receive daily.
To alleviate the pressure on the branches, the authorities have turned to involving private businesses as payment agents. In August, it was reported that 113 private businesses took on the cash payment of pensions for more than 3,000 retirees in the province.
However, the provincial director of Labor and Social Security, Oscar Mendoza Pérez, acknowledged that the goal is for 70% of retirees to receive payment through that method, a target that is still far from being achieved.
The deputy accounting director of Bandec Guantánamo, Yuder Ortiz González, hinted that the participation of private businesses is not entirely voluntary.
"It is not the same for someone who becomes a financial agent, assisting the bank in making a payment, as it is for an actor who does nothing. Therefore, all these analyses will be taken into account when interacting with an economic actor," he stated.
Cuba has over 1.7 million retirees, and the minimum pension is 4,000 pesos per month, approximately 5.70 dollars at today's informal exchange rate, while the monthly basic basket has been estimated by economists to be around 96,000 pesos.
Venceremos itself admitted in July that the banking situation in the easternmost of the Cuban provinces "has ceased to be a banking difficulty and has become a social problem", a description that remains valid in light of the most recent data.
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