The Cuban economist Pedro Monreal published a damning analysis on Friday regarding the state of the Cuban banking system, concluding that the country's banking sector is "in intensive care" while the regime identifies the "strong lack of progress in social communication" as a central problem.
Monreal's analysis, published on his social media, responds to an article from the pro-government Granma regarding the visit that the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Party made to the Central Bank of Cuba (BCC) and three commercial banks—the Metropolitano, the Popular Savings Bank, and the Credit and Commerce Bank (BANDEC)—led by Miguel Díaz-Canel.
In that meeting, according to the media of the Communist Party, the president of the BCC, Juana Lilia Delgado Portal, provided as the only explicit self-criticism of the sector the limited progress in institutional communication.
For Monreal, this diagnosis is severely insufficient given the actual context: an official year-on-year inflation rate of 28% —with independent estimates placing it close to 70%— and a Cuban peso that has depreciated by more than 115% against the dollar in the informal market since December 2025.
In the first week of November, the dollar reached 935 Cuban pesos in the informal market, compared to 793 CUP at the official BCC rate, while the euro rose to 1,000 CUP.
“Does anyone believe that with skyrocketing prices and a national currency dragged through the mud, the economy and society can reach a successful outcome?”, asked the economist.
Monreal points out that the meeting did not establish verifiable objectives for monetary policy—such as inflation, monetary base, exchange rate, and liquidity—nor did it explain which instruments will be used to recover the value of the peso.
The economist also noted that the monetary or quasi-fiscal origins of the imbalances were not addressed, nor was the relative failure of the peso as a means of payment, unit of account, and store of value recognized.
This void is particularly striking in the context of the package of 176 economic and social transformations approved in June 2026, which for the first time since 1959 includes the authorization of private banking and private exchange houses, but which —according to Monreal— lacks a specific axis for macroeconomic stabilization.
By the end of October, the regime reported that 171 of the 176 measures already had completed legal bases and that 215 regulations had been approved to support them, although Díaz-Canel acknowledged that five measures remain unimplemented.
In the meeting with the banking sector, the Cuban leader attributed the difficulties to the U.S. embargo and stated that the country is going through "a difficult and complex period marked by the deepening of the unilateral coercive measures of the United States government, which cause a contraction of economic activity and a shortage of foreign currency."
Monreal, who throughout 2026 has systematically questioned the contradictions of the Cuban economic model, implicitly rejects this framing by pointing out that the opacity of the Central Bank "stems from internal decisions."
"While the banking system remains in intensive care due to the persistent deterioration of the peso and the absence of a credible monetary anchor, focusing the diagnosis on the 'few advances in social communication' reveals a disconnection between the severity of the crisis and the level of self-criticism," the economist concluded.
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