Cuba’s communist regime admitted over the weekend that there are fewer than 10 million Cubans left living in the country after the island nation lost more than 300,000 of its inhabitants in 2024 — a year that also marked the lowest birthrates recorded in Cuba in the past six decades.
On Saturday, Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, deputy chief of Cuba’s National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), explained at a meeting of the Cuban Government Commission for Attention to Demographic Dynamics that the country ended 2024 with an effective population of 9,748,532 inhabitants — more than 300,000 less than the 10,055,968 that regime officials estimated in 2023. Of the remaining total, Alfonso Fraga pointed out, “more than a quarter” are individuals 60 years old or older.
Alfonso Fraga also announced that Cuba only registered approximately 71,000 births during 2024 and pointed out that the number of deaths “has increased” by an unspecified amount. It remains publicly unclear at press time if the regime official failed to provide numeric data on the increase in deaths or if Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, chose to omit the data in its report.
Alfonso Fraga stressed that the elderly population in Cuba will continue to increase while the number of children, adolescents, and “young people who reach school age from primary to higher education” as well as “those who reach the reproductive, defense, and working ages” will continue to decrease. As a result, the regime official reportedly stressed the urgency for the “planning and design of economic and social development strategies from the municipality to the nation.”
According to Granma, Antonio Aja Díaz, director of the Center for Demographic Studies of the University of Havana, pointed out that Cuba’s demographic situation is not a “problem to be faced, but a reality to be addressed.” Aja Díaz stressed the need to analyze the consequences and impacts that the demographic situation has for the economic and social strategy of the country, its territories, and each agency of the Central State Administration.
“We have to think about the population, because many times we make the design and then think about the population, and this situation does not allow us to do so,” Aja Díaz said.
Cuba has been experiencing the continued collapse of its population, one of the numerous consequences left by more than six decades of disastrous communist policies enacted by the Castro regime that have pushed the nation to the brink of complete ruin. More than 90 percent of its population is estimated to be living in conditions of extreme poverty, leaving a growing number of Cubans to scavenge garbage to find something to eat.
By the end of March 2023, the Castro regime estimated that there were barely over 11.08 million inhabitants left in Cuba, over 1.33 million more than ONEI’s latest statistical information. Experts warned in July 2024 that Cuba lost 18 percent of its population between 2022 and 2023.
At the time it published its 2023 report, Cuban officials registered 95,403 births in 2022 and 99,096 in 2021 – a number that, while significantly below the minimum 2.1 fertility rate required to reach population replacement levels, was higher than the roughly 71,000 births registered in 2024. Alfonso Fraga admitted in 2023 that Cuba has been unable to achieve a 2.1 fertility rate since 1977 and warned at the time that Cuba’s population could drop to fewer than 9 million by 2054.
The ongoing collapse of Cuba and the nation’s dramatic humanitarian crisis has pushed a growing number of hundreds of thousands of Cubans to flee from communism in what is now widely described as the worst migrant crisis in the country’s history, larger than the 1980 Mariel exodus and 1994’s rafter crisis. More than 850,000 Cuban migrants reportedly arrived in the United States between FY2022 and FY2023, citing statistical information from its Customs and Border Protection Office (CBP).
Despite the ongoing collapse of Cuba’s population, the Castro regime introduced changes to the nation’s health code in late December 2023 to legalize the practice of euthanasia in the nation — which the piece of legislation reportedly describes as “the right of people to a dignified death.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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