The restrictions imposed on private businesses (MSMEs) mean that this sector represents only 4.5% of private employment.
14ymedio, Madrid, 23 July 2025 — It is pointless for Cuba’s official press in reporting the most recent employment survey published this Tuesday by the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), to highlight that the island has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the region (1.7%). The weight of reality begins to dawn in the second paragraph: more than half of Cubans over the age of 15 are either unemployed or not looking for work.
The official State newspaper Granma doesn’t put it that way either, but rather affirmatively: “Around 50% of the population aged 15 and over is part of that workforce, while the rest is outside of it for reasons such as studies, retirement, disability or other conditions.” The Onei figures are clear: of the 8,433,226 Cubans aged 15 and over in 2024, 4,227,333 people were not part of the workforce, compared to 4,205,893 who were (50.1% compared to 49.9%). Of the latter, however, 69,333 are unemployed.
This represents an employment rate—the percentage of people of working age who have a job—of just 49%, one of the lowest in the region. As EFE reports, the average in Latin America and the Caribbean last year was 58.9%, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO).
Other characteristics of the Cuban labor market, as pointed out by Granma, include “the aging of the workforce, structural imbalances, and informal employment.” More than half of those employed are over 45 years old, and the average age of those employed is 44.3.
Other characteristics of the Cuban labor market, as pointed out by Granma, include “the aging of the workforce, structural imbalances, and informal employment.”
Among those with jobs, nearly 50% (48.8%) are between 45 and 64 years old, while 47.3% of unemployed Cubans are in the younger age bracket, between 15 and 34. This is consistent with overall population figures more than a quarter of Cuba’s 9.7 million residents are 60 or older, making the country one of the oldest in the region.
In addition to highlighting that “52.1% of the working population is ‘aged’,” Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, deputy head of the National Institute of Statistics and Census (ONEI), stated that one of the survey’s “novel” indicators is the “presence of 20.1% of employed people in informal employment,” defined as “work for pay or profit, but lacking links to Social Security, depending on whether they are owners or employees, both within and outside the informal sector.”
Of these, the official highlighted that 58.5% “are associated with the self-employed category,” that is, the private sector, where “seven out of ten workers” are “in the informal sector.”
Cuban economist Pedro Monreal, who lives in the US, highlights another issue in this regard: the “fragility” of non-state employment, “concentrated in self-employment” (TCP*). “Almost four years after MSMEs [Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises] were legalized, they only account for 4.5% of non-state employment, while TCP accounts for almost two-thirds of non-state employment.” This indicates, for the specialist, “minimal progress in the adoption of a more advanced private institutional format than TCP.”
Several experts and MSME business owners themselves point out that the stagnation in this sector is due to the restrictions imposed by the government, which continues to prioritize the state sector.
Monreal warns of the perverse effects of this policy: “Maintaining two-thirds of non-state employees in the TCP segment relegates the non-state sector to functioning as a very low-productivity appendage of the state economy.”
*TCP = Trabajo por Cuenta Propia. Literally “working on one’s own account,” i.e. self-employment.
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