15

Beardo my gosh, I have never had problems like that. It is true you have to estimate the cucs they will get.

16

I'm sorry to hear that Caribbean Transfers has gotten tied up in the south Florida witch hunt for "anything Cuban"

Cubaselect: that was far from the case. The owner of Caribbean Transfers has been indicted as a key conspirator in a group involved with the laundering of millions of dollars obtained in Medicare fraud, white washed through a check cashing service and ultimately hidden in foreign bank accounts. He is now an international fugitive.

17

Maybe my initial post was not clear so I am going to outline the experiences I have with this.

First obvious note is you can only send any currency BUT USD. Send USD , even by mistake and they´ll be lost forever because ALL USD wires are run through New York for clearance and get grabbed. Hence, for instance, I send Euros.

My son opened an account at Banco Financiero and, it took him about 30 minutes to do.

He had to make a min 50 cuc deposit to open it although, the 50 Euros can then be used, so long as there´s a positive balance available. Some years ago I made “1 transfer” to his account. I added the account number and, it asked for the swift. The swift for Banco Financiero (all branches) is BFICCUHHXXX. Once I added the swift, my online banking automatically located the bank and, presumably, the branch (as it never asked for this) number from his account number. I recall the first wire well because, I did it on a Monday and Tuesday he told me he got the money! I was shocked of course. Since then, I must have done at least 50 more wires and, all I do is look for a past wire I’ve done and press “resend” and it collates all past data and simply requests the amount and asks for the swift again which, I simply copy and paste. Done.

The transfer costs (my bank) used to be initially (2009) 22 Euros all in. The last wire I did was 26 euros bank fees and it’s been stable at that for the last 8 months. One thing to watch out for and, I´ve seen over the years, is the exchange rate into CUC. They now use 1-1 USD so the base rate is the USD/EURO rate on the day the money arrives. I use XE.com to monitor what he ends up getting and, over the last 10 or so wires, if the rate (example) was 1.30 then he´ll get 1.20 based on the money deposited in his account. Therefore, the bank is taking the spread of 0.10 on almost all occasions, which I find to be reasonable as the buy/sell rate is a common bank money earner…

The most it has ever taken is 4 days but, generally, its 2 and, on more than one occasion, it’s arrived the same day… (Yes I know it sounds surreal). On most occasions I use an account we maintain at Germany´s Commerzbank but, I´ve also used our Euro account at First Caribbean a few times, both with similar results.

Over the years I´ve used a myriad of remesa type outfits such as transcard, Caribbean transfers and, I even sent him a mastercard once (which got swallowed by the ATM and was in my name so he couldn´t get it back…) but, the easiest/cheapest/fastest way has been the above for the past 5 or so years. He also has a free cash card from the bank so he simply checks his balance and withdraws as we all do outside Cuba.

Hope this helps and any questions, fire away!

 

 

18

Yes, that is my experience. The one I did last week was to someone who did not have a bank account. I was very reluctant to do it but they convinced me it could be done. It worked without a hitch.

19

#18 Thanks for taking the trouble to elaborate - effectively you are making bank transfers which from Oz our experiences were similar to Beardo's UK's i.e. time consuming and expensive.

BTW your quoted 26Euros bank fee is 32AUD whereas our instantaneous transfers from an account to a credit/debit card in Cuba cost $3.50 irrespecttive of the amount.

But glad that is a good pathway for your needs.

ps re "I even sent him a mastercard once (which got swallowed by the ATM and was in my name so he couldn´t get it back"
No Mastercard has ever worked in a Cuban ATM - only Visa. Why would he have even tried that?

20

#15. I get all the way to the end......Verified by Visa page. It shows my bank, my "message" attached to my registered card...etc.

All I have to do is enter my Visa Verisign password which I do.. it goes off for a few seconds and comes back to the AIS site saying that it failed authentication.

I've checked all my info as it appears in my account for the card and checked the info on my Profile on AIS, and the only difference is the country code in front of my phone number "1". There is no way to get rid of it.

I'm baffled and getting no response from AIS.

21

#20 The credit card is the best alternative if you can control their cash advances. I never could. I pay 5 bucks for each advance when iI use it in Cuba.