Peace Corps to Journalism to Law School to Fintechs to QvaPay: The Long Way to Havana
Guatemala, journalism, law school, Mexico City, Todito Cash, Uphold, Airtm, and a sandbox that became a U.S. fintech for Cuba.
Tim Parsa · Co-Founder & CCO, QvaPay · 1 September 2026 · 4 min read Subscribe
People ask why a lawyer from Brooklyn builds payments for Cuba. The short answer: every job I’ve had was a step toward it.
- Peace Corps, rural Guatemala, 1991–1993. My first lesson in what bad money and no bank do to people who work hard.
- Journalism, all along. I wrote before, during, and after everything else on this list, including for New York magazine. In 1997 a cover story, “Club Red”, took me to Havana for the first time. I saw a country full of talent with no access.
- Law school, 1993–1996, and Cleary Gottlieb, 1996–1997. I trained as a lawyer and was admitted to the New York bar in 1997. I learned to read the rules the way regulators do.
- Grupo Salinas, Mexico City, 1997–2010. I went to work for Grupo Salinas, co-founded Todito with Guillermo Salinas Pliego, Ricardo Salinas’s brother, and conceived and built Todito Cash, so Mexicans could pay online in pesos. My first money bridge.
- Uphold, 2013. With JP Thieriot I co-founded Bitreserve, later Uphold, and used my legal and fintech background to build its compliance program: bank money to bitcoin and back, under U.S. law.
- Airtm, 2015. We built Airtm on Uphold’s API: any money to dollars, through peer traders. I was its most prolific trader for the first eighteen months, and its compliance officer.
- Airtm on its own. Airtm grew into an independent, venture-backed company, the dollar network for Venezuela, then Latin America, and in 2020 the rail the Venezuelan interim government used, under an OFAC license, to pay health workers.
- The QvaPay sandbox at Airtm. QvaPay’s first U.S. bridge ran through Airtm. To test whether a U.S. fintech could serve Cuba’s independent entrepreneurs under U.S. law, we set up the Airtm Cuba Sandbox and put the questions to OFAC.
- QvaPay, Inc. Today QvaPay is its own company: independent, U.S.-based, and registered with FinCEN, built with Erich García Cruz, who created QvaPay in Havana.
Most fintechs hire a lawyer after they build. I was the lawyer who started building. In Cuba that order matters: the product is only as good as the rules it runs under, and Erich builds faster than anyone I’ve worked with.
A long way to Havana, and every step was practice. I’m a techno-optimist because I’ve watched technology open one closed money system after another, and Cuba is next.
Every stop on the path was practice for these flows: family money, peer markets, and dollars on a phone.
| Flow | How we grow it | U.S. tech meets Cuban talent |
|---|---|---|
| Remittances Permitted · 31 CFR §515.570 (U.S. senders) | Marketing by use case to the diaspora in Miami and beyond; every sender and recipient screened. | Diaspora dollars become working capital for families and the private businesses they start. |
| 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. |
| Crypto funding and withdrawals Own funds, screened addresses · withdrawals by persons in Cuba: pending with OFAC | USDC from and to screened wallets, settled by Crypto Teller. | Cubans hold dollars on a phone, the way the rest of the internet does. |
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.
Cuba’s private sector is neither a boom nor a mirage: a large, growing class of entrepreneurs operating outside the state, fragile but real, that U.S. policy should engage directly. On cubanew.com ↗
Sources
- Tim Parsa, "Scaling Stranger-to-Stranger Services", 27 November 2020 ↗
- Tim Parsa, "I Build Money Bridges", 16 March 2020 ↗
- Tim Parsa, "Independent Digital Entrepreneurs in Cuba" (the 2023 OFAC guidance request, published December 2025) ↗
- Uphold ↗
- Airtm ↗
- CNN, Venezuelan health workers get cash bonuses via Airtm, 9 September 2020 ↗
- FinCEN, MSB registrant search ↗
- QvaPay, AML/BSA program and transparency page ↗
If this was useful, pass it to someone building in Cuba.