A Money Bridge to Cuba
I have built money bridges for twenty-six years. All of them were practice for the one to Cuba.
Tim Parsa · Co-Founder & CCO, QvaPay · 9 June 2026 · 3 min read Subscribe
In March 2020 I published I Build Money Bridges ↗: seven lessons from building fintech that connects bad money to good. I was writing about Airtm and Venezuela. The biggest gap left to bridge turned out to be Cuba.
Money is a promise
Good money keeps the promise it made when you earned it. Cubans have lived for decades on money that breaks it: a peso priced by decree, an MLC you cannot freely convert, dollars that are hard to hold. QvaPay's answer is QUSD, backed one to one by USDC, minted when money arrives, and burned when it leaves.
Tolls, not trolls
Every bridge charges a toll. A troll also locks the exit. A fixed official exchange rate is a troll. The fix is competition, and nothing competes like a peer market where every trader is verified and screened.
Trust has to be shown
Cubans stopped trusting institutions long before the rest of us. So we don't ask for trust. Every account that moves money is identity-verified and screened, the ledger is monitored every day, and our AML policy is public. QvaPay, Inc. is registered with FinCEN as a money services business, which is how a U.S. bank can stand behind us.
The operator is the new driver
For Airtm's first eighteen months I was the busiest trader on our own market. In Cuba, independent QvaPay peers trade dollars for pesos every day, on their own account, at the market rate. Cuban human capital runs the bridge. U.S. technology and U.S. law hold it up.
My first bridge was Todito Cash, in Mexico City in 2000: pesos to the internet. Then Uphold, bank money to bitcoin, co-founded with JP Thieriot in 2013. Then Airtm, any money to dollars. Erich García Cruz had already built QvaPay in Cuba. I brought QvaPay its first U.S. bridge, through Airtm.
Every one of those was practice for this one: a country of educated, connected, under-capitalized people, next door to the largest economy on earth, about to rebuild. U.S. technology should build that bridge, under U.S. law.
The peer market is the bridge between dollars in Miami and pesos in Cuba.
| Flow | How we grow it | U.S. tech meets Cuban talent |
|---|---|---|
| P2P forex Pending with OFAC · no authorization asserted | SkyMind matches orders and more screened traders join. | Every trader is a small business: Cubans earn a spread connecting dollars and pesos. |
The potential. Remittances into Cuba run an estimated $1.1–2B a year (2024; estimates vary). At the Dominican Republic’s rate per person, Cuba would receive about $9.8B, five to nine times today. That is the market QvaPay is built to serve.
| Market | Cuba today | Cuba at the Dominican Republic’s rate per person |
|---|---|---|
| Remittances received | $1.1–2B 2024 est., estimates vary | $9.8B DR total $11.9B (2025) |
A scenario, not a forecast. The Dominican Republic received $11.9B in remittances in 2025 across 11.4 million people, about $1,040 a person; at that rate Cuba’s 9.43 million people would receive about $9.8B a year, five to nine times today. Method and sources.
The private sector is close to a third of Cuban jobs, about 15% of GDP, and close to 60% of retail, and imported more than $2 billion in 2025. Their roadmap includes direct private imports and exports. On cubanew.com ↗
Sources
If this was useful, pass it to someone building in Cuba.