Cash App Bans Cuban Users

According to a tweet posted by Bitcoin Magazine, Cash App has started censoring users from Cuba. This is due to economic sanctions imposed on the Caribbean country by the USA.

Cash App is a popular peer-to-peer payment application, allowing for quick money transferring and investing. According to reports, it’s doing quite well, having made $12.3 billion in revenue just in 2021, along with 44 million active app users. Most of Cash App’s revenue comes from Bitcoin, making this rather unfortunate news for Cuban crypto users. Cash App is also offering its own debit card, which more than 13 million users own.

Cuba has had a trade embargo put in place in 1959, shortly following Fidel Castro’s revolution. The embargo terms are not much different now, 63 years later, despite Donald Trump stiffening some of them, and Joe Biden loosing up the terms.

Yuri Gala, Cuba’s United Nations representative

However, just yesterday at the United Nations (UN) assembly, the U.S. and Israel voted against ending the trade embargo, despite 185 countries approving the proposal. The reason cited concerns the 2021 protests in Cuba and the pertaining violation of human rights, said the U.S. political coordinator, John Kelley. The other side of the story was offered by Cuba’s UN representative, Yuri Gala, who said that if the U.S. genuinely cared about human rights, it would lift the embargo affecting Cuban residents.

Of course, Cuba is not the only country making the crypto news these days because of sanctions. The eighth package of sanctions against Russia was recently put in place by the European Union due to the country’s war efforts against Ukraine. This package has banned Russian crypto payments to European wallets, effectively stopping the residents of Russia from using crypto.