By Eloy Viera Cañive (El Toque)

HAVANA TIMES – Cuba is facing, perhaps for the first time in its recent history, three simultaneous demographic crises:
a) a sustained decline in birth rates;
b) a massive exodus that is driving out its young and skilled population; and
c) accelerated aging that is fundamentally transforming the country’s social structure.

This diagnosis is neither new nor isolated. For years it has been described by sociologists and demographers—both independent and those linked to official institutions—and the problem is so evident that it has even been acknowledged in what Napoleon would have called “the Assembly of the Mute,” today’s National Assembly of People’s Power.

At its regular session on December 18, 2025, the authorities confirmed that Cuba’s population declined again this year and that, according to current projections, by 2050 the country will have barely 7.7 million inhabitants—about 2 million more than the population recorded in 1950, a century earlier.

The result is a country that is no longer reproducing itself, that is rapidly losing its labor force, and whose population pyramid is inverting at a pace comparable only to nations that have gone through prolonged wars or deep structural crises.

Much has been said about the economic and social consequences derived from these combined crises.

A shrinking labor force

When the population declines and ages, the labor market inevitably contracts. The productive base comes to depend on an ever-smaller group of young people of working age. In Cuba, this phenomenon is even more critical because it is........

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