Cuba’s Private Businesses Must Pay a Toll on Their Dollars

A tollbooth is not a bridge. It does not carry anyone across the river. It merely stands in the lane, lit at night, asking for its share before the road continues.

Cuba has built one inside the dollar.

On September 10, the government published two new resolutions governing foreign-currency accounts and the use of hard currency across the economy. The documents sound, at first glance, like another late concession to reality. Private businesses can open foreign-currency accounts without prior permission from the Banco Central de Cuba. They can receive money from exports, online commerce, foreign transfers and certain sales. They can deposit foreign cash. They can pay overseas suppliers for imports, services and financing. For the Cuban entrepreneur who has spent years improvising around state monopolies, these are not small permissions. They describe something approaching a normal business bloodstream. (gacetaoficial.gob.cu)

But the bloodstream has a valve in it.

For many of the foreign-currency revenues covered by Resolution 103/2026, an economic actor without an approved retention coefficient keeps 80 percent. The remaining 20 percent goes to the state’s central cash box and is credited back in Cuban pesos at the exchange rate applicable to that actor’s segment. The private business is allowed to earn the dollars. It is allowed to see the dollars. It is even allowed, in carefully defined circumstances, to use them. But it is not allowed to forget who owns the road. (gacetaoficial.gob.cu)

This is the real news inside the legal machinery. Havana has not liberalized the dollar. It has licensed the dollar to operate under supervision.

There is a case for the rules, and it deserves to be heard plainly. Cuba needs formal channels for money that now moves through relatives, travelers, WhatsApp arrangements, suitcase imports and the black market. A business that can pay a supplier directly is better positioned than one forced to find an intermediary abroad. A bank account is safer than a drawer. Basic scrutiny of foreign payments is not, by itself, tyranny; every functioning financial system has rules against laundering and fraud. The island’s businesses need a way to import inventory without treating every purchase as a minor act of smuggling. In a country starved of liquidity, the state also has an obvious interest in drawing dollars out of mattresses and into circulation.

Yet a government’s need for hard currency is not the same thing as a government’s right to permanently intercept the prosperity of the people producing it.

The resolutions are unusually frank about the architecture. They call it “partial dollarization.” Retail activity remains, as a general rule, in Cuban pesos; sales in foreign currency require authorization from the Ministry of Economy and Planning. Private actors may accept hard cash when a customer chooses to pay that way, but they must deposit it into fiscal accounts. Withdrawals are allowed only according to bank availability and commercial policy. The state has opened a window, then placed its hand on the sash. (gacetaoficial.gob.cu)

That matters because Cuba’s small private sector has become less an ideological experiment than a public utility the state refuses to call by its name. It feeds people, moves packages, repairs appliances, rents rooms, sells food, imports the items that the official economy cannot reliably provide. The regime has tolerated it because necessity is more persuasive than doctrine. But tolerance is not trust. Every new opening arrives with a collar, a ledger and an office that reserves the right to close the gate.

The new dollar rules repeat that pattern in miniature. The state says to the entrepreneur: earn more, import more, connect to the outside world more directly. Then it says: report the account, deposit the cash, accept the conversion, wait for the withdrawal, and leave a fifth behind.

A tollbooth does not care whether the driver is carrying groceries, medicine, spare parts or hope.

The timing exposes the desperation. Resolution 102 replaces a foreign-currency-account rule issued only nine months earlier, in December 2025. The government is not unveiling a settled monetary order. It is continually rewiring one. A rule that must be replaced before its first year is not necessarily proof of bad faith; it can be evidence of a government confronting an economy that changes faster than its paperwork. But in Cuba the paperwork is also the method. A system that cannot produce enough goods, currency or confidence substitutes permissions for solutions. It issues another resolution because it cannot issue credibility. (gacetaoficial.gob.cu)

There is an older historical irony here. The opening of 2015 to 2017 was built around the hope that Cuba might become legible again: to American travelers, investors, banks, entrepreneurs, families divided by water and policy. That opening is gone. It was a closed historical window, not a model sitting in storage waiting for a future administration to reinstall it. But Cuba’s rulers learned the wrong lesson from its disappearance. They learned that outside capital was dangerous unless politically contained. They did not learn that money cannot be made productive by being treated as contraband with paperwork.

The island now wants the practical benefits of normal commerce without accepting the independence normal commerce creates. It wants the private sector to find dollars but not accumulate too much autonomy. It wants citizens to solve shortages but not become a constituency that can demand institutions equal to their effort. It wants the diaspora’s money, but not the diaspora’s leverage. It wants a market that supplies the state without ever becoming strong enough to question it.

That is why the 20 percent is larger than 20 percent. It is a governing philosophy in decimal form.

The rules take effect seven days after publication. By September 17, Cuban businesses that have learned to survive between currencies will have another official route through the maze. Some will use it. Some will benefit from it. Many will find that an account is still not access, that a balance is still not cash, and that a legal dollar is still not fully theirs. (gacetaoficial.gob.cu)

The tollbooth will remain in the lane, collecting proof that the state has mistaken control for movement.