Cuba's informal exchange rate moved in two directions at once over the 30 days to 6 September. The dollar rose from 673 to 683 pesos while the euro fell from 783 to 7751. El Toque, whose index is the benchmark rate for the island's real economy, publishes the levels but has not drawn the comparison, and CiberCuba, a general Cuban news site written largely for the diaspora, cautions that a 30-day reading may cross a methodology change.
A general peso collapse would push both currencies the same way, because the peso would be losing ground against everything at once. Two hard currencies parting company points at the demand side instead, which means dollars are becoming scarcer or harder to source than euros rather than the peso weakening across the board.
If the reading holds, it is what a campaign against banks, fuel wholesalers and nickel traders would be expected to produce, because those are the channels through which dollars reach the island. Cuba legalised dollar accounts without forced conversion into pesos in June, so which currency a household is paid in is now a financial position rather than a detail. A family remitted from Miami lost ground this month while a family remitted from Madrid gained it.
