Madrid/It is known since last July, The government itself recognized itthat the population of Cuba had collapsed below 10 million, but until this Friday they had not announced the specific data. The number of inhabitants on the island as of December 31, 2024, reported Juan Carlos Alfonso FagaVICEIZEFE of the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), was 9,748,532, more than 300,000 people less than in the previous year (10,055,968), said the official himself.
He also indicated that more than a quarter of the Cuban population is 60 years old or more, and that the elderly is the only population group that grows in recent years. At the end of 2023, for example, according to They revealed just three months agothis strip accounted for 24.4% of the population (2,452,489), a point more than the previous year and almost five if compared to 2016 (19.8%), when it was already considered high. In 20 years, in addition, the increase was 9.7 percentage points.
To these dramatic figures, it is joined that last year only about 71,000 births were recorded, “the lowest figure of the last decades,” they granted.
Last year there were only about 71,000 births, “the lowest figure of the last decades”
Given this panorama, the authorities gathered in the Government Commission said on the issue chaired this Friday by the Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero, “implement strategies” for the demographic dynamics program is “a priority”. One of them is the establishment of “fertility programs and the maternal child program.”
In this regard, Marrero asked the “business organizations” to create children’s houses “according to the demand of their own workers.” “It cannot be that the central government, with a budget, with the Ministry of Education, we have to be making investments for this, when those are mothers that are linked, who are generating wealth, working with the State, in certain business organizations that are those that have to execute, ”lamented the prime minister.
At the meeting, of which the Caribbean Channel news echoed, they also revealed that the entire budget for social public policies has not been executed. Referring to this, Marrero asked “discipline” and cried out: “How is it possible that we have money and do not execute it?”
In any case, they acknowledged: “Although work in different programs dedicated to serving the elderly, we are an aging country, so the strategies and actions that are implemented to protect the demographic dynamics of the nation are still insufficient.”
“How is it possible that we have money and do not execute it?”
The publicist’s publication Lázaro Manuel Alonso spreading the news immediately filled with comments that pushed bitter humor. “I would like to know where the mandads of the almost three million missing are,” wrote Yariel Abrahatic Jiménez, to which DQBA replied: “Simple, the rice ship of the month of December, January and February arrived, now the Three million people missing. ”
Others simply ask for explanations. “And how are they going to solve the matter? Right now we return to six million again, ”says Erick Sánchez, referring to the number of inhabitants in 1959, to the triumph of the Revolution.
What at no time mentioned in the official media are the causes of the dramatic decrease of the population, which specialists such as Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos Come close to “implosion.”
This Cuban economist and demographer published last July a study that estimated that Cuba had lost 18% of its population between 2022 and 2023 mainly due to migration. The numbers of Albizu-Campos were more pessimistic than those of the government (8.62 million inhabitants), but are congruent with the fact that many emigrants who left less than two years ago still have as residents on the island.
In any case, he explained the figure for many other additional indicators, such as the increase in child poverty, the rise in maternal mortality, the fall of life expectancy or the rebound of pregnancies among adolescents.
