Papers around the world have reported that ING Bank has agreed to pay a fine of $619 million for illegally conducting transactions on behalf of Cuba. ING was reported to have channeled at least $2 billion through US banks since the 1990s in contravention of the US embargo against Cuba and Iran. Other European and UK banks have been charged and convicted of similar offenses involving Cuba and other countries.

This revelation once again raises the question of just how effective the US embargo is at constraining Cuban economic activity. If $2billion were known to be involved with just one bank, how many more billions went undetected?

Banking developments such as this underscore the difficulty of quantifying economic activity in closed market societies such as Cuba. But this can still be done using indirect indicators.
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Links:

News Release

US Department of Justice
http://www.justice.gov/
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/June/12-crm-742.html

Cuba Under Embargo:
The Macro Impact
available at Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Cuba Embargo