At the end of September, journalist Manolo Rodríguez visited one of the agricultural fairs that “are organized every weekend in Havana.” Among his objectives was to highlight the popular acceptance of “digital payment channels” for this type of purchase. But he found a reality that bore little resemblance to the one he had gone looking for. The majority of customers continue to prefer cash over “digital payment channels,” for reasons ranging from speed of operations to practicality for them.
“Super complicated. If it was with the card, this, that…this queue was going to last forever,” a woman aged around 60 told him. “Not everyone has a cell phone. I myself am retired and I don’t have a cell phone because I don’t have enough money to buy one,” added another.
Agricultural fairs are organized on Saturdays in at least one point in each municipality of Havana. According to the journalist, “they have high attendance because prices are controlled by local governments.” Although private and state sellers can attend, cooperatives and agricultural enterprises from the capital and Artemisa and Mayabeque prevail.
Postponed
Since its design, the bancarization policy has put senior citizens at a disadvantage. Their commercial dynamics demand a level of knowledge and access to technology that is unattainable for many of them. In addition to lower purchasing power, there is a gap in digital literacy and access that leaves this age group on the margins of electronic commerce and socialization processes.
In March 2022, former Minister of Economy and Planning José Luis Rodríguez estimated that some 800,000 retirees — half of those in the country — received the minimum pension of 1,528 pesos per month. Applying the informal exchange rate then, the amount was equivalent to about 15 dollars. A year and a half later, the value of the national currency is two and a half times less.
The peso devaluation, which impacts all areas of Cuban society, harshly conditions the prices of imported items. Among them, are smartphones, which are currently impossible to find at prices below 10,000 pesos in the informal market.
The smartphone is an essential device for e-commerce; even to access services such as extra cash, which the official discourse promotes as an “alternative” to the insufficient ATMs.
“If you don’t have a phone to ‘read’ the damn QR, how are they supposed to send you to collect at the grocery store?” criticized Rogelio, a pensioner who lives in Guáimaro, one of the hundred municipalities in Cuba that do not have ATMs. To have cash, its 36,000 inhabitants depend on a handful of extra ATMs that provide service mainly in the main town, at four small banking agencies, or going to the closest cities that have ATMs: Las Tunas (45 kilometers) and Nuevitas (60).
The first option requires that commercial units have sufficient cash; the second means waiting in long lines and that there is cash, and the last one is unthinkable given the transportation crisis. For an elderly person who lives in a remote community, the difficulties multiply.
Even so, the government’s intention is to continue reducing payroll payments and for more and more elderly people to collect their pensions through magnetic cards, the general director of the National Institute of Social Security (INASS), Virginia García, said in August. Some 623,000 pensioners in Cuba (38% of the total) still receive their income through traditional means. And before the end of 2023, at least all residents in Havana will be given transfers through the card.
However, García accepted that “it is difficult for all pensioners to enter the path of electronic payment channels, because in addition to the fact that not all have the tools, knowledge, and habit, more than 70% receive a minimum pension, and when they go to collect, they take out all of it in cash.”
Bancarization will continue its roadmap regardless of reality. Since the beginning of 2022, the percentage of retirees who receive a minimum pension has grown, with all that this implies in terms of social vulnerability.
Caridad, a 69-year-old woman from Camagüey, although she is not among those who receive minimum income, feels on the edge of social vulnerability. “I am not [within the social vulnerability group] because of the help of my children,” she confessed. She has accumulated 37 years as a primary school teacher and receives early retirement to care for her sick mother. For her, terms like “bancarization” or “digital commerce” are a distant echo.
“I have a pension of 3,700 pesos, and my mother’s, as a widow, is just under a thousand. What digital purchases can we talk about? My son even has to take out the money from my checkbook, because, with the long lines at the banks, I either take care of my bedridden mother or get paid. I can’t imagine how those who don’t have someone to help them will manage.”
Without help
In 2021, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security drew attention to the fact that 17.4% of senior citizens on the island lived alone. On a human level, the statistics had a concrete “translation”: 431,000 elderly people depended on themselves for daily activities. The number has not stopped rising and will continue to grow in the future, in line with the trends of population aging, the migratory boom, and the low birth rate in Cuba.
“In sixty years, the size of Cuban families has been reduced by 40%, which means that there are fewer and fewer people capable of being caregivers within the family nucleus,” Dr. Liliam Rodríguez, director of the Research Center on Longevity, Aging and Health, explained in October 2022. Not all people who reach old age need help; but a large part of them do, to varying degrees, it was reflected on during a panel on old age and care attended by specialists from the Ministry of Public Health and other agencies.
The academic understanding of the phenomenon continues, however, without finding an echo in State policies.
“You wonder: when I reach that age, will I be like this? And it’s really scary,” said Massiel, an employee of Banco Popular de Ahorro (BPA) in Camagüey. For more than a year, on pension collection days, Massiel was one of those in charge of operating, for retirees, one of the ATMs at the branch office where she works.
“The lines were tremendous, the old people marked from early morning because they needed their money. The idea of designating a person to handle the ATM responded to the difficulties they experienced with these devices: they couldn’t enter the password, their cards got stuck… Then we stopped doing it because we couldn’t keep up with the work at the branch, due to the bancarization and the number of tellers who have requested to leave; but the line of old people is still there, just as bad or worse.”
Elderly people consulted in the vicinity of Camagüey banks agreed that the quality of the institutions’ services has decreased. One of them, who had been given his magnetic card, was not even explained how to activate it; another received two cards for the only account he has in his name.
Despite the insistence of the official discourse regarding the need to incorporate the entire population into digital commerce, the training program in financial and digital culture, with courses dedicated to senior citizens and vulnerable people, promoted by the Union of Computer Scientists of Cuba in mid-September, will not alone resolve the social, economic and digital gaps that determine the exclusion of the elderly.
In mid-October, President Díaz-Canel half-opened the door to changes in the bancarization policy, which would take popular opinion into account. “We are going to share with the population this analysis, which is going to be very critical, because we have every intention of rectifying, in the shortest possible time, all those deviations that may exist,” he said.
For many seniors, the solutions would involve increasing the availability of cash. “Although pensions are useless, if it weren’t so much work to collect them it would be something,” said Rogelio, interviewed for this report. Statements by a BPA official about the printing of new banknotes, which were not denied at the beginning of September by the presidency of the Central Bank, would indicate that the government has at least moderated its policy of reducing cash as much as possible. It is not a decision that is going to change the lives of Cuban pensioners, but it could make it a little easier.
Author
Amado Viera
