Tourists have to convert their Dollars or Euros into “Cuban Convertible Pesos” (CUC). You can do that in Havana and Santiago. Restaurants, hotels, gas stations etc. will charge their prices in CUC. Sometimes you can pay food in Cuban Pesos (CUP), so you might want to have maybe 10 of those handy as well.

Someone told us to bring plenty of single Dollar notes, which we did, but that advise was from a period around 2000, when Cuba was accepting Dollar as a currency. Forget about bringing dollars. You actually get the better exchange rate for Euros.

Needless to say that the money is worthless outside Cuba and at best you can use it to decorate your refrigerator.

Food is in general relatively cheap. The same is true for cabs in Havana (even though we never figured out how they end up with the final price, we also never felt ripped off).

Everyone in Cuba is happy about a tip. Since the economy is virtually non existing, you can only make a decent living if you have access to CUCs. Over-tipping is certainly not a good idea. But keep in mind that people typically don’t make more money in a month than you spend on a single meal (that’s also why you should check out “what to bring”). That’s also why we felt less bad about those cases where Cubans where charging us the CUP price in CUC...