 When was the last time you had fish? I don't remember. You don't remember? When was the last time you had lobster? Never. Never? You've never had lobster everywhere? It's not for Cubans. It's not for Cubans. It's for tourists. Rampard's inflation, communism and a struggling economy. A dystopian combination for such a picturesque location. I'm in Cuba, a Caribbean island known for its cigars, rum, music and fun. As well as getting stuck in huge conflicts between international superpowers. It's also the most fertile ground for Bitcoin adoption that I've ever seen. My name's Joe Hall and I'm a reporter for Cointelegraph. Joining me on this trip is going to be this guy. Pako de la India. We flew to Cuba to investigate the growing Bitcoin community I'd read about in the book Check Your Financial Privilege by Alex Gladstein, the CSO of the Human Rights Foundation. Plus, I wanted to attend Cuba's first ever Bitcoin meet-up. But before we get there, there's one more thing Cuba is famous for. Nuclear Armageddon. Yeah, you heard that right. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in 1962 during the Cold War, just one year after Cuba became a communist country. Thankfully, that crisis was averted, otherwise we wouldn't be here, but the communist state of Cuba endured. Even today, the Cuban economy is centrally planned, which means it's run by the government. This is Cuba. Let's go on a Bitcoin adventure. Welcome to Cuba. The airport is so old, man. No, it's all red. It's like Marxism. I'm so scared. They stopped me for like 15, 20 minutes. To every checkpoint he got stops, I sailed through. Pako went into a separate line, was quizzed by other people. What were they saying? He's like, what do you do here? Why are you here? And I'm like, I make videos. He's like, on what? I'm like, Bitcoin. He's like, so you give advice on Bitcoin? I'm like, no, I make travel videos. And then he was like, show me. I'm like, here, I don't have internet. He's like, even I don't have internet. True story, they didn't have internet. Welcome to the pitch piece. How old is Pako? Like, 30 something? I am 33. 33, okay. Yeah, so this cold is older than us. And yet he has a garment at the same time. And there's a lovely fake apple sticker, just to... Pako, have you got your seatbelt on? No, there's no seatbelts. They didn't think about safety back then. There's no seatbelts. There's no bloody seatbelts. There's no seatbelts. There was no danger in the 50s. Wow. Life is better, I think. Do you know Bitcoin? I guess I don't know Bitcoin. We are online in Cuba. Check the download speed. Apparently, we've got 0.06 Download 0.04 Upload Bitcoin doesn't need it to be any faster than that. So this will work for Lightning. This will work to pay for stuff. And this will work to send money places. We just linked up with two of these sort of louder voices in the Bitcoin community. We're going to go for dinner with them. A place that accepts Bitcoin. It's called El Cuarta de Dola. This is my friend here who doesn't want to reveal her identity. He's showing me how to buy Bitcoin. I'm here with telegram groups. What's up? What's up? What do you have? Please bro. I'm buying Sats 50 to 500 Mlc. I'm selling it. Yeah. Bye. It's just gonna... It's a coin. It's over. So, Cuban pesos. I'm going to the port. Okay. So now she's doing the transfer of Cuban pesos. I'm sending the money. I'm giving it to the order. It's called El Cuarta de Dola. It's called El Cuarta de Dola. Yeah. So that's how you buy Bitcoin peer to peer in Cuba. Telegram groups over lightning. It's almost zero feet or basically zero feet. It's one person. Pretty quick. And you just post it and share it on telegram groups. So the government doesn't know that they're sending Cuban pesos to each other for the purchase of satoshis. It's fucking wild. It's so cool to see. It blew me away how much people are putting into Bitcoin here. How much they're educating themselves. How much they're realising they need it. And one of the girls we're talking to, she's putting pennies into Bitcoin. She knows in 10 years time, 20 years time, 30 years time Bitcoin will still be there while the Cuban peso might not be. You know, using all these digital tools to find a way to build for her own future. How phenomenal is that? Also, she says the groups are growing. There are more and more people interested in this technology. The other thing is they don't care about bull runs. They don't care about bull runs and bear markets because when the peso is so bad, Bitcoin can crash from its highs of 69,000 to 4,000 and it's still doing better than the Cuban peso does over time. I've never seen a use case as strong as Cuba for Bitcoin adoption. It's just absolutely wild. So this morning we've come to Mr Navi to sell a little bit of Bitcoin for some Cuban pesos to have some cash in hand. However, he's told us that it could take some time because we have to count out a lot of paper money. Yeah, you'd give wads of cash for like really small items. It's such an inconvenience, such an inconvenience. I guess that's what happens when your currency is hyperinflating. And that's 1,000, that 1,000 is equal to five dollars. So there's 20 million. So 20 million, how much is that in dollars? 100 bucks. 100 bucks and it looks like that? Yeah, it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. 300. This is only 400 dollars. Look at all this paper. So it reads the invoice, 9% I say, yeah, sure. Yeah, you got it. So fast. Yeah, yeah. I really love Bitcoin. I really love it. This is something incredible. 400 dollars is the monthly salary of three or four professionals. I think you're an atomic engineer. Can we make one only dollar a month, something like that? Oh my God. And that's what it looks like. Well, the minimum salary is 2,500 pesos. 12 dollars. So the minimum salary is 12 US dollars a month. And the average salary is about 4,000 Cuban pesos, which is roughly 23 dollars per month. That is frightening. As my friend, Katria, explained, the average salary for a Cuban is peanuts. I have literally no idea how Cubans live off this amount of money. A study by Columbia Law School concluded that, despite the direct and indirect government subsidies, the cost of living in Cuba is completely disproportionate to workers' earned income. According to the study, a Cuban's average salary covers just 12.5% of their living expenses. But as Katria explains, Cuban salaries are lower still and they cover something in the order of 3% to 8% of projected living expenses. I'm going to try to explain to you what is going on with the money here. You're familiar with an American dollar. So two years ago, one of those was worth 25 Cuban pesos. Because the currency has devalued so much, nowadays, supposedly, it's worth 120 pesos. But the official rate and the rate that we pay is actually 200 pesos. Okay, 200 pesos. So we've gone from one dollar being worth 25 pesos to 200 pesos in just two years. It's devalued eight times. Four months later, and the peso has crashed even further. One dollar is now worth 250 pesos or 10 times less. I'm in danger. So I'm here with Vitalio, who's the other co-founder of the Cuban Bitcoin community. Vitalio was saying an interesting phrase earlier about how Bitcoin could be the salida or the exit. It's a currency that only has value within the Cuban borders. If I go out to another country, I can't acquire any good, no service with that currency. Bitcoin gives us that freedom of being able to cross that border. Without Bitcoin, we're locked up here. But already, Bitcoin, being a universal money, a money that doesn't know a border, that exit could help the Cuban family. It would help them a lot. The government controls the majority of the means of industrial production, agriculture, energy, manufacturing, telecoms, banking, telecommunications. You name the industry, it's likely they control it. Price-controlled goods can be bought in these places called kiendas, or shops, a network of government-run stores. However, in these government-run stores, they accept the MLC. Whereas if you have pesos, you can expect queues and worse quality products. To find out more about the MLC, which sounded a lot like a CBDC or a central bank digital currency, I reached out to Eric Garcia Cruz, the founder of Cuba Pay and Bitremesas. He has been a little critical of the regime of late and is now on Cuban-humanitarian parole in the US. What is the MLC? Spanish is moneda libremente convertible. It's a shitcoin that is big with dollars. It sounds like USD. You give me your dollar and I give you a shitcoin. And you can use that cheap con only in the stores to buy food. This is the MLC card. So basically you're spending dollars. In reality, it's spending MLC, which is what the government tells you is dollars. The government issuing MLC in return for USD is a way of the government collecting or stacking or saving USD. There is a reason for that because the government, the only way they have to trade with some country is using fiat physically, using the dollar bills and not using a digital transaction like any other country could do. Cubans are also given a predetermined amount of subsidized food on a monthly basis. There are often shortages for Cubans of basic food stuff that you probably ate today. When was the last time you had fish? I don't remember. You don't remember? When was the last time you had lobster? Never. You've never had lobster everywhere? It's not for Cubans. It's for tourists. Yes, for tourists. At any point in Cuba, you're always 30 miles or 50 miles I think from the coastline. And yet this is the first time my friend is eating lobster. How cool is that? But also how sad is that? Chicken, eggs and milk. But if you asked my friends here the last time they had some eggs... And a glass of milk? For a while. For a while? Just think about how easy it is to get a glass of milk in whichever country you're in right now. While these price controls help maintain affordability for essential goods, they also create distortions in the market, leading to shortages, black market activity and incentives for production and investment. Meet Julian, my new Cuban-American friend who's one of the lucky few able to set up a business in Cuba. Following a series of protests in August 2021, the Communist government of Cuba relaxed laws allowing the creation of small and medium-sized businesses. While it might seem like a step forward for Cuba, there was also a lot of red tape and bureaucracy standing in the way of creating a business. But for my mate Julian, it was easier thanks to being born in the U.S. to Cuban parents. So Julian and his dad run a tourism business as well as Mr Navi's, a bar and restaurant that sells goods that's hard to get your hands on in Cuba. Like consumer electronics and even sex toys. You're paying pesos but you can't accept Bitcoin? Yeah, you can pay in pesos but we can also accept Bitcoin as well. Dude, let me just say this. $1 is 200 pesos. $1 is 200 pesos. That is 25 cents. Yep. Miami people, South Beach. What are you doing to us? I paid $6 for a bottle of water. We make our own snacks as well. Our own coffee, our own chocolate powder for your milk. And why do you make it all yourselves? We make it because it's somewhat difficult in order to reach people, like the Cuban people, there's not like a supermarket here. In Cuba, there is no Walmart, McDonald's or Big Chains. And you can absolutely forget your Starbucks ventilate. And that's what we're trying to have here. We're trying to make a supermarket here for the Cuban people. And that's what we don't charge in dollars, we charge in pesos so that the Cuban people could afford it. Pesos or satoshis, right? Or satoshis, yeah, yeah. That's it. So this is five cigars. We have two portugas and three Romeo and Juliet church ratios. These ones are nice. Thanks so much. I've been doing documentary about Cuba without buying some Cuban cigars with Bitcoin. This is probably one of the coolest purchases I've ever made. Let's go. It's almost like being Cuban is risky. Why don't you use exchanges, crypto exchanges, in Cuba? Many people put the limitation that because you're Cuban, you can't enter. Binance, Coinbase, a lot. Simply because you're Cuban, having a Cuban passport in Cuba, we're blocked. The economic, commercial and financial embargo. Let's see, this is blocked by IP. But if you enter using a VPN, if you disconnect the VPN and see that your IP was Cuban, you're blocked on the account, even if you already found it. If we choose to be in Bitcoin and be sovereign with our money, why are we going to give it to someone so they don't hate it? That's not the solution. Bitcoin was created so that each one would decide what to do with it. That could be an advantage because to use a lot of this service you have to do a KSC. However, in Cuba, since the start we're denied by DeFaul, we can never do KSC. So that's good for us. At least in terms of privacy it's better not to have our data there. It's kind of interesting that because you can't access exchanges you have to use Bitcoin and Lightning in a peer-to-peer way, to learn how to use it better, which means that you learn about custody, self-custody, how to use Bitcoin peer-to-peer. It's kind of cool in a way. There are no exchanges in Cuba as unfortunately it's very hard to register as a Cuban citizen due to the embargoes. However, Bitcoin finds a way with peer-to-peer transfers signal groups and in-person meet-ups. Bitcoin always finds a way. We're going to do a peer-to-peer trade using Telegram and the Lightning Network and Kateria is going to talk us through it because this is one of the things she shows Cubans how to do. I'm going to create an offer and Kateria is going to buy it off me. So, create a sell order. She's going to ask me how many. Selling sats for $20 $20? Let's do $20. Enter the payment method. Your offer has been published. That was done automatically. That's cool. Yeah, that's me. It's my offer. Wow. So just come through on mine saying hey, somebody wants to buy you $389 sats for $20. No, $20. So I'm going to copy that. I'm going to open it in a wallet and then I'm going to send. So sending, sending, sending. Yeah. It's already got there. I guess it's Lightning, right? Oh, thank you. There you go. I can tap on release sending your sats and gone through. Yeah! A growing number of private bars and restaurants in Cuba accept Bitcoin. We visited five of them in the capital spending satoshis for mojitos, frijoles and Cuban sandwiches. I asked the owners why they choose to accept Bitcoin. Why do you accept Bitcoin here? We started accepting as another way to accept money with the problem that we have in Cuba. Economic problems that we have with a lot of different currency. You are accepting Bitcoin because you are dealing with a private coin. Transactions, you do it and you have the freedom to do whatever you want with that. The CD, and I realized that I can keep my capital and I started to buy some Bitcoin. What I loved most about Bitcoin is the freedom you have with your money. I can go wherever I want and have my money. So I said, I'm going to start my business and try to include Bitcoin in my business. So I was speaking to my friend here that you are a private organization and you accept crypto. You are on your own. There is no law that prohibits you from accepting crypto. What does that mean if you are on your own? That means the government doesn't interfere into it. That's the positive thing. For example, you are a foreigner and you come to Cuba and with Bitcoin you don't need to bring cash. It's safer. It's an opportunity to connect to the world and to have a currency that actually means something to people in any part of the world. There is a big problem for all the businesses in Cuba and the problem is how do you pay to your providers? You can't pay to your providers with CUP or MLC. So the suppliers you are talking about here are foreign suppliers, presumably in the US or Mexico. I am orange-pilling those suppliers. I am very excited for Saturday which is going to be Cuba's first ever Bitcoin only meet-up on the island and it's going to be where people like Gadre and Forte come together to discuss how to use Bitcoin on a daily basis and how to avoid this financial apocalypse which is affecting Cubans all over the country. It's really heartening actually so it's cool to see. In the morning we ordered a taxi today using Cuba's version of Uber which is another sign that Cuba is opening up. It pretty much works like Uber but with some slight Cuban differences. You can technically order one of these on La Nave but again, this didn't exist three years ago. It's wild how fast it's changing here. You walk into the meet-up and there are just people setting people sat people learning how to use the telegram group people generally asking questions about Bitcoin and it's men, women, children elderly people, young people it's not like the Bitcoin meet-ups in countries in Europe for example where it tends to be a lot of white middle aged men talking about the fall of the death of fiat currencies. It's a happy vibe and it's optimistic hopeful and just very fun really. I'm saving Bitcoin for my own retirement I'm self-administration of my retirement fund. How old are you? 24 and you're saving for your retirement at 24 with Bitcoin? Yeah I can do it in Cuban pesos USD$ all that is kind of cheap so I have to use Bitcoin. Wow. Bitcoin is a free and free world and you can interact with the world with a more free world. Bitcoin, since it started in Cuba it's easier to access the internet and I use it to trade. If I could get to more people like we're trying to do with communities, I think people will know it and they won't abandon it. It allowed me to use services that I couldn't pay and it helped me with inflation The meet-up was the culmination of months of hard work, stress and anxiety. Forte, Catria and Vitalion risked the scrutiny of the Cuban government to organize the event and to see such a wonderful positive response from the local community was a lot to bear. I think that when you really understand Bitcoin it's a little bit complicated to choose something else. I feel a little a little bit sad but I'm happy. We are about to get into a pink Cadillac as a little gift to the Cuban Bitcoin community organizers because they've never done it before and you know can't live in Cuba and not do this sort of thing. First time bro, first time for them. First time, first time. Wow. While using Bitcoin might not be illegal in Cuba using a drone definitely is. How was the meet-up? Very good. We loved it. We thought that there was almost no one but a lot of people and they liked it. Very exciting. Wonderful. We didn't think that people would have had so much acceptance and so much interest in the Bitcoin in Cuba and we hope they repeat it. There were a lot of people who didn't have coins there. And people were really happy. They just come there for food or drinks. They just came. They sat there to listen. So congratulations to another Bitcoin meet-up next month. And to getting home safely. Remember, don't start. And thanks to Cointelegra for this car. Cheers bro. As I look back on a week spent in Cuba I can't help but feel more optimistic and more joyous about the future of Bitcoin adoption in Cuba. There's one big thing standing in the way and that's the risk of the government cutting off the internet. They could do that and they actually did that last year. During the protests they turned off the internet for over a week leading to blackouts and inability to communicate and to connect online. Bitcoin is of course digitally native currency. It lives on the internet. It's magic internet money. But even if it were to go offline or call it until the internet comes online again or they find a new way to access their internet. So yeah, the genie is out the bottle here. Bitcoin is here and Bitcoin is like a mushroom. You know, you can leave it in the corner you can throw shit at it and it will still continue to grow. Turn the lights off whatever it will still grow. And I've never seen a country like this in all the countries I've used Bitcoin in which is so fertile and so ready to take Bitcoin and run with it. It's lightning native. It's peer to peer. It's easy to use a population that's educated higher than any other country I've seen in the world. Everyone here, the taxi drivers to the waiters, they all have degrees in engineering medicine lawyers, you name it. They are far superior educated to anyone you meet in the US or Europe. There's a bright orange future for Cuba and people are grabbing it and they're seizing it with their hands. That fills me with hope, fills me with optimism and this has been a really moving experience for me but I know that there's now Bitcoin as a salida, a Bitcoin as a way to resolve or to solve the problems that people face on a daily basis. A hyper-inflating currency, difficulties in transacting, difficulty in receiving remittance and difficulties in starting businesses. Bitcoin resolves and fixes all of these things in a smart, easy to use and digitally native way. That is a message of hope for Cubans. That is a message for the Cuba of the future. This has been Joe Hall reporting for Cointelegraph.