By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Oct 23 1998 (IPS)

In Cuba, most people’s salaries are paid in the local currency, the peso, yet foreign exchange bureaux opened by the government in 1995 have been doing brisk business.

“I change at least 20 to 30 dollars a month to make sure my family has a decent diet,” said Ruben Valle early Friday morning in the downtown cambio that operates in Coppelia, Havana’s most popular ice cream parlour.

Valle, a 53-year-old teletypist, prefers to show up early in order to avoid the long lines and the more than one hour wait which are usual after 9:00 AM.

With his salary of slightly more than 200 pesos a month, in order to get by, Valle needs the 300 dollars sent every three or four months by his brother who has lived in the United States for more than 20 years.

(The peso is on par with the dollar at the official rate and stands at 21 to the dollar in the official foreign exchange bureaux).

Cadeca, a corporation of exclusively Cuban capital, has been buying dollars for 21 pesos for the past few months, and when it sells, it does so at the same price. But a handwritten sign placed on one of the walls of the little white booth in Coppelia reads “foreign currency only bought, not sold” for the time being.

Today 66 exchange bureaux are operating in Cuba, 39 of them in Havana, but only 20 are allowed to sell convertible pesos, a currency issued at the same value as the dollar on the domestic market.

The president of Cadeca, Felix Rodriguez, told the local press that the limitation on sales of convertible pesos was part of a policy of the Nueva Banca group – to which Cadeca belongs – which gives priority to foreign currency purchases meant to benefit the national economy.

The activity of the cambios is growing year by year and official sources say two billion pesos have been traded so far this year, half of the total turnover since 1995.

Rodriguez says business should pick up even further if remittances from abroad – especially from the United States, home to more than one million Cubans – increase.

In February 1997, Washington banned remittances to Cuba. But in June, President Bill Clinton authorised money orders of up to 300 dollars every three months. Remittances also come from Spain, Mexico, Canada, Venezuela, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, France, Australia and Chile.

Local experts estimate that around 500 million dollars a year are sent home by Cubans in the United States, but the U.S. government puts the figure at as high as 800 million.

Local inhabitants also obtain dollars by charging tourists or resident foreign nationals for services, and through incentive mechanisms in certain economic sectors.

Cuban authorities believe the appearance of the cambios on the local economic scene triggered a tendency toward appreciation of the peso. In 1995 the dollar was worth more than 100 pesos.

But experts say the policy, aimed at boosting the value of the local currency by lowering the exchange rate, is at times artificial, and does not correspond to real economic parameters.

Sources close to the banking network, set up as part of a bank reform conducted by the government to decentralise activity in the sector, say a new depreciation of the dollar to around 15 pesos could occur in the near future.

The government is attempting to rake in the greatest possible quantity of hard currency while doing its utmost to prevent an increase in the amount of pesos in circulation, estimated at around 9.4 million.

An even greater drop in the value of the dollar in the foreign exchange bureaux could become an incentive for speculators who buy up hard currency and a breeding-ground for swindlers.

Black market currency traders hang around exchange bureaux on the lookout for people who are in a hurry. “I did it once and they tricked me,” said computer technician Milagros Reyes.

“There are not very many exchange bureaux, and there was a huge line that day. I was going to change 40 dollars, and the man who traded me pesos gave me a bunch of counterfeit bills,” she complained.

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