Show Me The Money
If you were among the millions of travelers who visited Cuba each year before the pandemic, you may have saved some of the Cuban money with which you paid for cigars, restaurant bills and just about everything on your journey to that country. Not only are they now worthless, buying things in Cuba today is far more confusing than before.
Cuba used to have two currencies. Cuban citizens used regular Cuban pesos, and tourists used Cuban convertible pesos, known as CUCs. Each CUC—equal to a U.S. dollar—was worth 25 regular pesos.
In January 2021, CUCs were replaced by regular Cuban pesos, known as the CUP. (CUCs could be exchanged for pesos at the time.) And the values fluctuated. Unlike dollars, pounds, euro or yen, Cuban money doesn’t trade on standard exchanges. Its value is set by the Cuban government, and you can’t go to a currency exchange station in an airport or bank for Cuban currency. Not only is it solely available in Cuba, but how much you get for your dollar fluctuates. So, exercise caution.
First, you’ll encounter misinformation. A search on the Internet for the exchange rate will likely show that one U.S. dollar gets you 24 Cuban pesos, which is completely inaccurate. The official government rate for Cuban pesos to U.S. dollars when we traveled in February was 120 for every dollar. However, at restaurants (which gladly accept U.S. dollars) or in other unofficial areas of monetary exchange, you can get 200 to even 300 pesos for every dollar. The rate we found was 250.
If you were to use the rate you Googled, 24 for every dollar, your money would likely not last a day. A plate of pasta in a decent Cuban restaurant goes for around 3,000 Cuban pesos, meaning it would have cost you $125. Meat dishes can go for 8,000 CUP, about $333 at the erroneous rate, $66 at the government rate, but a more reasonable $32 at the black-market rate.
With Cuban pesos topping out at bills of 1,000 CUP in value, paying for a meal is an experience that will make you feel like a drug lord, with cash stacking up in enormous piles. (We are told that, much like banks, most restaurants now have bill counting machines in the back.) We found that you need to have some amount of local currency to pay for certain things in places that just won’t accept U.S. dollars. Most restaurants will gladly take your dollars at a fair rate of exchange.
Figure on roughly 20,000 CUP per person per dinner with drinks, although a good bottle of wine or a high-ticket steak can greatly inflate those numbers.
Then there are the places where only a charge card will do. They include hotel incidentals and cigar shops—at least on the official level. U.S. dollars and Cuban pesos are not supposed to work in cigar stores in Havana, although you can persuade someone to let you pay for a few single cigars with cash. Cards are the name of the game. You can get a form of debit card in your hotel. On two of our encounters, U.S. credit cards were accepted, something that shouldn’t work.
If you’re traveling to Cuba, be aware of the new and confusing monetary situation. Going uninformed or misinformed can be a considerably costly experience.
