With no electricity for ATMs, it’s cash only in Puerto Rico.

FAJARDO, Puerto Rico — Juan Jimenez squinted into the dark lobby of his bank early Friday, thinking about the paycheck sitting in his account, just behind the locked doors. If only he could get to it.

With power failures and communications outages still widespread nine days after Hurricane Maria, much of Puerto Rico has become a cash-only island for Jimenez and others who desperately need to buy food, gasoline and ice from stores that cannot run credit cards, take phone payments or process electronic government benefits.

“You’re broke even if you have money,” Jimenez, 40, said.

Fewer than half of Puerto Rico’s bank branches and cash machines are up and running, still crippled by diesel shortages, damaged roads and severed communications lines.

Bank officials say they are struggling even to find employees who can get to work when there is no public transportation and gasoline is hard to find.

Across the island, people who have spent their last dollars on an $8 bag of ice or $15 for gasoline are waiting for hours outside banks and ATMs in hopes of withdrawing as much money as possible.

The cash crunch offers a glimpse of how Puerto Rico’s struggling economy, in which unemployment stood at 10 percent even before the storm, has ground to a near standstill across much of the island, as people with $11 in their pockets and no clue when they will return to work or restart their businesses now spend their days waiting for hours under parasols and the searing sun for basic supplies.

As people wait, rumors swirl about cash shortages and strict limits on withdrawals — neither of which is true, banking officials said.

Zoime Alvarez, vice president of the Association of Banks of Puerto Rico, said there was enough cash on Puerto Rico and more arriving to meet what the New York Federal Reserve called “extraordinarily high demand.”

And banking officials said the $500 daily limit on ATM withdrawals had not changed since the storm, though bank branches that were still offline were imposing $100 limits. About 90 banks and 200 ATMs are working across the island, government officials said. But many are opening late and closing by 2 or 3 p.m.

“We have been getting shipments of money,” Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló said. “We want to make sure people get access to the money that they need immediately, and recognizing that we are in an emergency situation.”

Enyoliz Parrilla, 35, has been rationing her cash as if it were a finite supply of water in a lifeboat.

She had about $40 left, and as she pushed her cart through a reopened supermarket, she added up the cost of bread and milk. She wanted to keep the bill to $25.

“We’re just holding on,” she said.

She once had a thriving catering business serving birthday parties and weddings, but the storm and days without power had ruined her food and stopped any new business, she said.

As their money dwindled, she and her husband were contemplating leaving for Orlando, Fla., where they have family.

But some spots were islands of convenience.

At a CVS drugstore in San Juan, the manager, Hector Juan, 37, said the chain’s system for processing credit cards was intact, and the store was thrumming with customers who formed a line that snaked back among the partly empty shelves.

In line was Juan Pou, 47, a mechanic, who had two, 2-liter bottles of Coca-Cola and two packages of white bread in a basket. It was difficult, he said, to find fresh food, and he was eating a lot of grains.

Pou said that chaos was to be expected in a world where everything, including transactions at the store, relied on an ephemeral network of ones and zeros. “In the modern world,” he said, “everything’s computers.”

Jimenez, who waited in line outside Scotiabank, said the cash shortage forced him to get creative and tiptoe into the black market. Here in his eastern hometown, Fajardo, he was able to use his credit card to buy several packs of Newport cigarettes from a big-box retailer before the store ran out of diesel and had to shut down.

He and his wife traversed their neighborhood, selling packs of cigarettes for $10 each. Jimenez said he was not trying to make money — just to stockpile cash to use at the gas stations and markets that now accepted nothing else.

“I’m like a drug dealer,” he joked.