STORY: This is the first grocery store to accept hard U.S. currency in Cuba in nearly two decades.
Open a few weeks, it’s part of the growing use of the dollar in the Communist-run country…
where, just four years ago, banks stopped accepting cash deposits in greenbacks.
The shop lies in the shadow of a new hotel complex near the sea in Havana’s Miramar neighborhood, which is popular with foreign diplomats.
William Fernandez, one of the lucky few to have dollars, praised the store.
“The dollar is always going to circulate here in the whole country. The dollars that come in can be used here because you don’t have to be exchanging money to get other products in other ways. Here it is easier to buy and we get everything here.”
Cuba’s government hopes dollar stores will reap some of the remittances that enter the country,
and allow it to use that hard cash to underwrite social programs like free healthcare and subsidized food, energy and transportation.
Relations between Havana and Washington took a turn for the worse this week,
when U.S. President Donald Trump reversed measures brought in by the Biden administration to make it easier for Cuba to acquire dollars.
That’s likely to make the dollar crunch more severe.
Here’s economist Omar Everleny.
“The country has a shortage of foreign currency and therefore the quickest way to make up for this shortage is to accept dollars again, because the dollars that were already deposited at other times in the banks no longer exist.”
But the growing availability of goods and services in dollars, versus the local peso, underscores growing inequality between those with and without access to foreign currency.
Odisbel Saavedra Hernández said she receives U.S. dollars from her husband abroad to feed her children.
“I hope that these markets spread throughout the country, but that other people can also have the same benefit as me, because there are people who do not have dollars and cannot acquire the products.”
Cuban officials have said the “partial dollarization” that kicked off a year ago is tough medicine, but necessary to fix the island’s economy.
