Can I use my Danish credit card in Cuba?
Question: I live in Denmark and want to know if my Danske Bank credit card (which is not a MasterCard or Visa or Visa Gold) can be used in Cuba.
Answer: In a phone consultation with the Banco Financiero Internacional S.A., Cuba’s main international bank, they said that although you can use a credit card in Cuba against the Danske Bank, it must be either MasterCard or Visa. Cuba will not accept credit cards that are not either of these two categories.
Usually your bank or credit card server can provide information about whether or not their card is payable against banks that do business with Cuba, or whether there has been any change of policy. Cuban will not accept credit cards paid against U.S. banks as, to date, the U.S. banks do no pay.
Please also consult the answer to the following question for additional information:
Can I use travelers’ cheques and credit cards in Cuba?
This isn’t like engineering nuclear reactors here, eh? There should be some relatively easy way to handle even obscure outside personal credit cards for simple visits to Cuba.
Imperialist threats to foreign banks aside: if the cuban government insists on controlling credit inside the country (a reasonable demand, considering World political-economic circumstances), couldn’t there be something wildly elaborate, like say, first dumping credit from some outside bank into a type of cuban account expressly created for the purpose of visitors’ credit needs, all centralized in some primary cuban financial institution — before arriving or upon arrival — and then issuing a cuban card (at the airport even, or in the originating country) which draws on that cuban account only? Then when you leave, you just pull what’s left over back into the foreign bank.
What’s the problem there? There’s no real problem. ‘Vested interests’ are the problem, AFAIC.