The regime gives the figure of the current population of the Island: just over 9,700,000
14ymedio, Madrid, 21 February 2025 — It has been known since last July, as the Government itself acknowledged, that Cuba’s population had dropped below 10 million. However, until this Friday, they had not disclosed the exact figure. The number of inhabitants on the Island as of December 31, 2024, according to Juan Carlos Alfonso Faga, deputy head of the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), was 9,748,532—more than 300,000 fewer people than the previous year (10,055,968), the official specified.
He also indicated that more than a quarter of the Cuban population is 60 years old or older, and that the elderly are the only demographic group that has grown in recent years. By the end of 2023, for example, as revealed just three months ago, this age group accounted for 24.4% of the population (2,452,489), one percentage point more than the previous year and nearly five compared to 2016 (19.8%), when it was already considered high. Furthermore, over the past 20 years, the increase has been 9.7 percentage points.
Adding to these dramatic figures is the fact that only about 71,000 births were recorded last year, ’the lowest number in decades,’ they conceded.
About 71,000 births were recorded last year, ‘the lowest number in decades’
In light of this situation, the authorities gathered in the governmental commission on the subject, presided over this very Friday by Prime Minister Manuel Marrero, expressed that ’implementing strategies’ for the Demographic Dynamics Program is ’a priority.’ One of these strategies is the establishment of ’fertility programs and the maternal and child program.’
In this regard, Marrero asked the ’state business organizations’ to create childcare facilities ’according to the demand of their own workers.’ ’It cannot be that the central government has to be using the Ministry of Education’s budget to make investments for this purpose, when these are mothers who are employed, generating wealth, working with the State, in these business organizations that should be the ones executing these investments,’ lamented the Prime Minister.
In the meeting, which was echoed by the Canal Caribe news program, it was also revealed that not all of the budget allocated to social public policies has been executed. Referring to this, Marrero called for ’discipline’ and exclaimed: ’How is it possible that we have money and do not spend it?’
Nevertheless, they acknowledged: ’Although work is being done on different programs aimed at addressing the needs of the elderly, we are an aging country, so the strategies and actions being implemented to protect the nation’s demographic dynamics are still insufficient.’
’How is it possible that we have money and do not execute it?’
The post by pro-government journalist Lázaro Manuel Alonso spreading the news was immediately filled with comments full of bitter humor. “I would like to know where the rations are for the almost three million missing people,” wrote Yariel Abrahante Jiménez, to which D Jorge Daba responded: “Simple, the shipment of rice from December, January and February arrived, and now the three million missing people show up.”
Others are simply asking for explanations. ’And how are they going to solve the issue? Soon we’ll be back to six million again,’ says Erick Sánchez, alluding to the population figure from 1959, at the triumph of the Revolution.
What was not mentioned at any point in the official media are the causes of the dramatic population decline, which specialists like Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos view as close to an ’implosion.’
This Cuban economist and demographer published a study last July estimating that Cuba had lost 18% of its population between 2022 and 2023, mainly due to migration. Albizu-Campos’s figures were more pessimistic than the Government’s (8.62 million inhabitants), but they align with the fact that many emigrants who left less than two years ago are still counted as residents on the Island.
In any case, the figure is also explained through many additional indicators, such as the increase in child poverty, the rise in maternal mortality, the decline in life expectancy, or the surge in teenage pregnancies.
Translated by Gustavo Loredo
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