Tuesday, December 19, 2006

HAVANA, Cuba (Reuters): Cuba's Central Bank issued new bank notes with enhanced security features on Monday to prevent growing counterfeiting of convertible pesos (CUC).

The new bills add the denomination to the watermark and keep the revolutionary slogan "Homeland or Death, We Shall Overcome" in the security thread.

"There are lots of false bills in circulation, especially 50 and 100 CUCs. That's why they are changing them," said a Havana bank teller.

The Central Bank gave no details on counterfeiting, but a business source said the false bank notes were printed abroad, possibly in the exile community in Miami.

"There has been a lot of counterfeiting. They are so easy to counterfeit that you could almost do it on a good copier," said a resident foreign businessman.

"It could be the Miami crowd. I don't know. But they were not from here. They came from out of the country," he said.

The convertible peso is the strongest of Cuba's two currencies and worth 24 Cuban pesos. It was introduced in 1994 to circulate in tandem with the Cuban peso after Cuba legalized possession of the US dollar during its post-Soviet crisis.

The CUC is used to buy most consumer goods, especially since Cuba's communist government eliminated the dollar as legal tender in late 2004. Pegged at par with the dollar for a decade, the CUC was revalued in April 2005 to $1.08. The local script is worthless outside Cuba.

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