MIAMI, United States. — The Population and Housing Census, a statistical exercise that is carried out every ten years to account for the country’s population and other sociodemographic variables, will not take place in September as planned, the newspaper reported on Tuesday Granma.
Diego Enrique González Galbán, director of the Center for Population and Development Studies (Cepde) of the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), told the official media that the Census has been postponed due to delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. and to the “recruitment of the economic blockade (…), which limited the availability of resources for this task.”
According to the official, the aforementioned conditions have prevented the preliminary work that must be carried out before a study of such magnitude.
In that sense, the epidemiological situation “prevented carrying out field actions related to cartographic updating (mapping of the national territory at the block level), among other factors,” González Galbán pointed out.
The director added that this work is being carried out right now, when “a survey without omissions or duplication in the information” is already possible.
“All these elements indicate that it will take some time to actually carry out the Population and Housing Census, which in principle should be carried out in September of this year,” said González Galbán.
Likewise, the official made it clear that exercises such as the Population and Housing Census “are complex and costly for any nation.”
In his statements to Granma, the specialist indicated that Cuba has “a robust system for calculating the population annually, based on censuses with high coverage, in addition to the existing birth, death and migration registration systems.”
For the upcoming Census, whose date has yet to be defined, the Island will have some 1,400 electronic tablets donated by collaborative organizations such as the United Nations Population Fund, the United Nations Children’s Fund and the European Union.
It is also expected that a workforce of 40,000 professionals will be hired to carry out the census.
The last censuses carried out in Cuba date from 2012, when 11.26 million inhabitants were registered on the island, and 2002, with a record of 11.2.
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