I flew from Asia to Buenos Aries after on a whim deciding not to return home to the US. I ran out of USD a while ago. Everywhere in the world I can withdraw cash with a small fee and whatever the exchange rate is. In Argentina it was a $10 fee plus the government set exchange rate and max withdraw was 60,000 pesos. So I was paying $10 to get $60 worth of pesos.
I didn't know that, but it's possible because we still have a lot of weird exchange rules.
You can probably have got better exchange rates in some shady corner, if you don't mind the risk of been scamed by a random guy instead of the bank/goverment.