A stunning 10% of Cuba’s population — more than a million people — left the island between 2022 and 2023, the head of the country’s national statistics office said during a National Assembly session Friday, the largest migration wave in Cuban history.
The data confirmed reporting by the Miami Herald and Cuban independent media that sounded the alarm over the mass migration of Cubans amid a severe economic downturn and a government crackdown on dissent in recent years.
According to the official figures made public for the first time, Cuba’s population went from 11,181,595 on Dec. 31, 2021, to 10,055,968 on December 2023.
The emigration of 1,011,269 Cubans was the main factor contributing to a massive fall in Cuba’s population by the end of 2023, when the population stood at a number similar to what it was in 1985, said Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, the head of the National Statistics and Information Office.
Other factors were a high number of deaths, 405,512, and a low birth rate, with only 284,892 children born in that period, according to figures Fraga provided the assembly.
Crisis in Cuba
Cuba’s economic crisis is worsening. The country lost 10% of its population to migration, but the government announced a crackdown on the private sector. Read more on this story.
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Most of those migrants have come to the United States in what experts call the most significant migration wave in Cuban history.
According to U.S. border immigration statistics, 645,122 Cubans came to the U.S. seeking asylum at the border with Mexico and through a legal parole program created by the Biden administration from October 2021 to June 2024.
“Such statistics represent the largest migratory flow in the history of Cuba, both before and after the Revolution, much more numerous than any of the previous migratory waves since 1959,” including the Freedom Flights in the 1960s and 1970s, the Mariel exodus in 1980, and the rafter crisis in 1994, said Jorge Duany, an immigration expert who leads the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.
“It is reasonable to interpret this drain as a sign of general discontent with the island’s economic and political situation,” he said. “Thousands of Cubans, especially the youngest, have lost faith in the future of their country and have chosen to seek better luck abroad.”
A conservative estimate
The numbers released by the government might be a “very conservative” estimate of the crisis, Duany said.
He cited a recent paper published by the Cuban Research Institute and written by Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos, a professor at the University of Havana, that estimates the real population decrease was 18 percent, to 8.62 million, between 2022 and 2023.
Fraga, the official sharing the new data, said the latest population count was calculated by applying the new definition of “effective residence,” which is included in a new migration law proposal approved by the National Assembly on Friday. The official explained that his office counted in the current population Cubans who spent at least 181 days on the island each calendar year to arrive at the “effective population” figure.
Previously, the government had obscured the real extent of the ongoing migration crisis by counting those living abroad since 2020 as residents on the island. That year, the government issued a moratorium on the 24-month limit that Cubans were allowed to stay overseas before they lost their permanent residence on the island and other political and property rights.
Fraga said that of the million-plus people who left the island between 2022 and 2023, about 800,000 were between the ages of 15 and 59, which, combined with the island’s increasingly older population, would significantly affect the labor force, the cost of social programs and the sustainability of social security.
He added that the downward trend in population has continued so far this year and that the island currently has less than 10 million people.
A bleak prospect
It was a somber moment that capped a week of National Assembly sessions in which government officials shared data revealing the extent of the economic crisis and the failure of current government policies meant to increase production, address widespread shortages, deal with and crumbling infrastructure and tame inflation.
In particular, food production has collapsed in the country.
Alexis Rodríguez Pérez, a senior official at the Ministry of Agriculture, said the country produced 15,200 tons of beef in the first six months of this year. As a comparison, Cuba produced 172,300 tons of beef in 2022, already down 40% from 289,100 in 1989.
Pork production fared even worse. The country produced barely 3,800 tons in the first six months of this year, compared to 149,000 tons in all of 2018.
Almost every other sector reported losses and failed production goals.
The government has blamed the crisis on stricter U.S. sanctions, the COVID-19 pandemic and high international prices of food, oil and other supplies. However, the situation has become so dismal that even in the controlled setting of the National Assembly, government officials and assembly members repeatedly referred to the failures of the government’s policies and controls.
Discussions at the National Assembly have also unsettled many people in Cuba because senior officials failed to show concrete plans to fix the economy. If anything, many fear that the policies announced at the assembly might make matters worse.
In particular, Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero announced several new restrictions on the island’s private sector that, if enacted, could imperil its survival and aggravate food shortages. Marrero insisted that the Cuban government would not deviate from a centrally planned economy where “socialist state enterprises” are predominant.
Speaking to a Cuban news website, a leading economist living on the island, Omar Everlany Pérez Villanueva, shared his pessimism regarding the new policies, which he dismissed as “rhetoric” as opposed to the “structural changes that the country needs, which would lead to an increase in the production of goods, especially food.
“If in the socialist world that remains today, most of the companies are not state-owned, I wonder how a small country, without energy resources and blocked by the greatest power in the world, could make them work,” he said, referring to the U.S. embargo. “I hope I’m wrong because I want the country to prosper with its children and not to have them leave in despair.”
This story was originally published July 19, 2024 5:42 PM.