Visa

Visa suspended acceptance of Cuban-issued payment cards in June 2026 after its correspondent banking partners retreated from exposure to GAESA, Cuba's military conglomerate, ahead of the 5 June 2026 OFAC wind-down deadline. The suspension rendered card payments by foreign visitors and Cuban households effectively impossible. Visa did not take the action directly, but because its network depends on correspondent banks to clear cross-border transactions in Cuba, the banks' decisions to exit GAESA exposure Left Visa-branded Cuban cards with no clearing path.

Visa is the world's largest payment network by transaction volume, operating a global processing infrastructure that connects more than 14,500 financial institutions in over 200 countries and territories. It does not issue cards directly; instead, it licences its brand and processing rails to member banks, which handle issuance and the relationships with cardholders. This intermediated structure means that US secondary sanctions on an entity like GAESA travel through Visa's network via the correspondent banks that underpin cross-border clearing. When those banks exit a sanctioned counterparty, Visa's Cuban operations collapse upstream rather than by Visa's own decision.

The Cuban card suspension illustrates how US financial sanctions cascade through global payment infrastructure even when the nominal target is a non-financial Cuban conglomerate. For ordinary Cubans, the loss of card acceptance reinforces the island's dependence on informal dollar cash channels, compounding the foreign-exchange crisis already reflected in the CUP's record-low informal rate.