HAVANA, July 18 (Jesús Zúñiga) – In spite of the apparent recovery of the national currency, the U.S. dollar continues growing in importance among Cubans and its impact is felt ever more strongly in the island’s economy.
According to figures supplied by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, incentives to workers in certain areas of the economy, who are paid a small part of their salaries in dollars, make a significant contribution to the number of dollars in circulation.
Cuban authorities have never revealed exactly how much the workers are paid in dollars, but approximately 830,000 workers, or 23% of the labor force, receive these incentives.
The proportion of dollars to salary is small, however. Workers in the electric power company get 20 dollars a month, for example, and workers in the sugar industry get less than that.
The largest dollar-denominated income to the population comes from remittances from relatives abroad. Approximately half the population has some access to these remittances, either sporadically or regularly.
A recent survey showed that the average purchase per person at the dollar stores is 9 dollars. The flow of remittances from abroad is such, that it almost equals the income from the sugar industry, traditionally Cuba’s largest revenue producer.
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