The incredible case of venezuelan cash

It is no secret to anyone that Venezuela is going through one of its worst moments. In my #introduceyourself I mentioned that everyone here has had to reinvent themselves and we have also learned to value things that we didn’t value before. But just as we have had to be creative for our own survival, there are also those who take advantage of the circumstances and that abound. What you will read next, will probably seem crazy to you if your nationality is not Venezuelan. I think they could be considered science fiction stories for those who have no idea of the unusual things that happen in this wonderful but crazy and incomprehensible country.

Surely, you’ll get amount of people talking about inflationary phenomenon and deep explanations about what has produced this crisis that has done so much damage to my country. But in this case, I want to show you the perspective of someone who suffers it.

This story is about cash. Yes, the bills.

Imagine that you lived in a country that is attacked by hyperinflation, where your salary it’s not enough to do the groceries, where the highest denomination bill is Bs. 100K (with this you can only buy two eggs), where the electronic points of sales don’t always work and replacing them is almost impossible, you don’t always have access to the website of banks to do transactions (or they won’t mysteriously open, or because the internet in Venezuela doesn’t help since it is considered the most deficient of the American continent). Add to that the fact that there is no cash.

How we do? You will ask yourself. Well, I don’t even know. There are things you can’t pay electronically like bus fare, gas, vegetables in a street market, parking, tips, and many other things that will depend on where you get them or who sells them. And I repeat, everything here is extremely expensive so, if the highest denomination bill is not enough, imagine what it means to get sacks of cash to pay for some nonsense.

As if the thousands of hardships that we have to go through to get basic services and survive are not enough, I'll tell you the things we have to do to get the precious cash. Maybe, you may not believe it.

One of the ways to get cash is by lining up in long queues in a bank, investing between 2 and 3 hours of your day so you can withdraw a minimum amount. Normally, the amount they give you varies between Bs. 20K or 100K when we are lucky (I hope you remember that I told you that with Bs. 100 thousand you can only buy 2 eggs). For that reason many people have to line up for several days a week. Not all of us can do it, because many of us work and, for obvious reasons, we don’t have the time.

There was a moment where we could get cash advances in stores. What did this mean? Well, you could swipe your credit/debit card in a POS (point of sale) in exchange of cash. This modality was very comfortable and seemed to be a solution to this chaos. But SUDEBAN (the Superintendency of Institutions of the Banking Sector) prohibited these practices supposedly to "combat the shortage of cash that was being generated as a result of smuggling to Colombia." Well, the government can say anything to try to justify its inefficiency. The government always lies.

Another way we can get cash in this country, is even one of the most unusual. This option is THE PURCHASE OF CASH. Yes, as you read it. This practice is to pay a person who owns cash 120% more than the value of the money you are buying. For example, you need to buy 500K bolivars in cash, you must pay through an electronic bank transfer Bs. 1.100.000 in order to obtain the precious bills. You must remember at all times that the purchasing power of the Venezuelan is hit by one of the worst crises in the country and it’s not easy to pay Bs. 1.100.000 that surely not everyone is able to earn. By the way, the minimum wage is Bs. 1.000.000, the equivalent of 1.05 dollars.

Imagine again, that you go to a street market to buy vegetables and fruits. Obviously you don’t have cash but you do not have much money in the account either. When you ask the price of a tomato, they tell you that it costs Bs. 450,000 per kg. But if you pay it in cash, it would cost Bs. 120,000. Right at that moment you fall into despair because you would like to buy it in Bs. 120,000 but you can’t because you don’t have the bills. In this way, the money vanishes and with it, the hope of each one of us.

It’s not difficult to conclude what the consequences of this matter of cash have been. To name a few, I could tell you that many small merchants have gone bankrupt. People who were engaged in informal commerce, owners of kiosks, etc. Others have not necessarily gone bankrupt but their sales have been significantly affected by this issue and they have also been forced to rely on the goodwill of people when they commit to make the transfer (many bad people don’t). Sometimes due to problems with the internet or the lack of a smart phones, said transfers can’t be checked at the moment.

If you knew the amount of things you could write about our suffering and all the intricacies that derive from this specific topic, you would not believe it. But that would make this story much more complicated and the least I want is to confuse you. For this reason I focused on a single topic and reported it in the simplest way possible, explained from another perspective, without much technical or scientific language. Not because I believe you couldn’t understand it, but because it is always good to know other points of view.

Thanks for reading me.