Detained settlements: The infrastructures and temporalities of digital financial transactions between the United States and Cuba

Abstract

In this article, I trace how payment and money transfer systems in Cuba have expanded from underground courier services to digital platforms such as Airbnb and Bitcoin wallets. I focus here on payments being halted and deferred because of U.S. embargo restrictions that prevent correspondent relationships with Cuban retail banks and constantly flag transactions initiated in Cuba. Cubans and visitors to Cuba operating on these digital platforms are therefore exposed to new risks and forms of precarity. In the absence of a robust payment infrastructure, electronic transactions between the two countries have to be propped up and secured by networks of cash circulation. A social infrastructure of trust and informal networks emerges through which digital payment rails get repurposed to settle accounts, particularly when electronic payments get detained. This complicates the premise that cashless futures make payments more inclusive, efficient, secure, or in some cases decentralized, by showing how the histories of U.S. sanctions impede and cripple the ways electronic payment infrastructures work in practice, creating forms of exclusion for those located in "prohibited" regions of the globe.

Poor miners and empty e-wallets: Latin American experiences with cryptocurrencies in crisis

“…Yet, they are not the only spaces of cryptocurrency expansion and experimentation in Latin America. While crypto markets have crashed significantly in the Global North, economies in the Global South are growing in significance as spaces for tokenising natural resources (Howson, 2023), charitable giving experiments (Howson, 2021), and offers of opportunity to rebuild financial channels severed by sanctions and other infrastructural impediments (Campbell-Verduyn and Giumelli, 2022;Tankha, 2021). Questions of authority and monetary managementspecifically the entanglement of public and private interestsare key in understanding developments in cryptocurrencies in the Global South.…”