(Havana) The Cuban government will start selling dollars to its population from Tuesday, twenty days after it began buying them at black market prices, with the intention of creating an official foreign exchange market in the country, authorities announced on Tuesday.
Posted yesterday at 10:13 p.m.
“We will start selling currencies from tomorrow,” Economy Minister Alejandro Gil announced during a state television broadcast.
This measure aims to “build a foreign exchange market” in the country “that allows a legal exchange of currency”, which in turn will increase the purchasing power associated with the national currency, Gil said. .
A significant part of the Cuban population receives dollars – sent by relatives living abroad or from services rendered to tourists visiting the island – which they then exchange most often on the black market, and which therefore pass completely alongside the official economy.
With the intention of extracting the circulation of these currencies from the black market, the President of the Central Bank Marta Sabina Wilson announced on August 4 that banks and exchange offices would now buy dollars at the rate of 120 pesos per greenback. – that of informal exchanges at the beginning of August –, against 24 pesos for the official rate.
According to the President of the Central Bank, Marta Sabina Wilson, this measure had “a favorable result”. In twenty days, financial institutions “bought ten times more currency than they would have bought in a month with the exchange rate at 24 pesos”, she said.
For the sale of dollars, “the exchange rate taken into account is maintained at 120 pesos,” she said.
The American currency has soared on the black market since the implementation in Cuba, in January 2021, of an economic reform fixing the rate of the dollar at 24 pesos, and the suspension last June of the sale of dollars to population due to lack of cash.
Only branches of Cadeca, Cuba’s official exchange offices, will be allowed to sell dollars, and they “will only sell what they have bought”, Ms.me Wilson.
The sale of dollars will also be reserved for citizens, and not for small and medium-sized businesses, she said. And the acquisition will be limited to 100 dollars per person.
On Monday, the black market rate was 140 pesos to the dollar, but Gil said he was determined to maintain the 120 peso rate for state purchases and sales.
“We are going to defend the exchange rate of 120. We are going to find a way for the State, which is now participating in the sales operations, to be able to defend this rate,” he said.
Cuba is currently going through its worst economic crisis in thirty years, with a growing shortage of food, medicine and fuel, due to the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic and the tightening of the United States economic embargo.