Why Has Cuba’s Population Remained at 11 Million Since 1997?

In the last quarter of the century, the world population grew at an average rate of 1.2% per year, reaching a population of about 8 billion. There was a similar trend in Latin America, where the population already exceeded 600 million.

Except for war or other extreme events, it is unusual for a country’s population to stagnate or even decline over a 25-year period.

But Cuba is not a normal country.

In 1984 the island crossed the 10 million population mark; 11 million in 1997; and after some ups and downs, the latest figure for 2021 is 11.1 million.

For comparison: the population of Brazil in 1984 was estimated at 132 million; 167 million in 1997 and 212 million in 2021.

What are the reasons that explain this unusual trend in Cuba?

a little history

“In Cuba you ask everyone how many children they want to have and the answer is 2 children and they even have a line of first a boy and then a girl. It’s a breeding ideal from our Spanish grandparents,” he told BBC News Mundo, the Spanish news service. He explains to Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos, a professor at the University of Havana’s Center for Cuban Economic Studies.

The academic, who is also the author of several studies on the subject, points out that since the beginning of the 20th century, Cuba has had a different demographic behavior than its Latin American neighbors.

“As early as 1900, fertility was relatively low compared to the rest of Latin America, at 6 children per woman (7 in Mexico, for example, and even higher in other countries in the region), and the population began to adopt the small family order,” he explains.

In the first half of the last century, the island reached a level of development unattainable in other countries in the region and received a large wave of European immigrants, primarily Spanish.

Both factors determined its divergent demographic trend.

Beginning in the 1960s, declining infant mortality and greater access to health and maternity services, among other factors, led to a “baby boom.”

But it didn’t take more than a decade: In the 1970s, the rate of 2.1 children per woman, which guaranteed generational change, fell for the first time.

Thus, at the end of 1985, the combination of fertility and life expectancy in Cuba “looked more like the European average than the Latin American average,” Albizu-Campos says.

Birth rate, death rate and poverty

Cuba recorded 99,096 births, the lowest in six decades, and the highest death toll, 167,645, in 2021.

While the deadly wave of covid-19 hitting the country has increased the death toll, birth records confirm a sharp downward trend from years ago.

Today, the total fertility rate is 1.45 children per woman, well below the replacement rate? and also an average of 2 children in Latin America, according to World Bank data.

This trend emerges in a time of extreme crisis in Cuba, where there is a shortage of food, medicine, medical supplies and other basic necessities.

According to Albizu-Campos, the country is going through what some scholars call “The Malthusianism of Poverty.”

“In Cuba, 3-4 generations live together in the same house and food is scarce. So the first question a young couple asks when they want to have a child is: Where do I put it? , what will I feed it?”

In other words, Cuban women today perceive the birth of another child as a real risk for those already in the family.

He draws attention to the fact that when this situation continues over time, the reproductive pattern transforms and that, as in the ‘special period’, the main actor in the decline in the fertility level is women.

The “special period” was the extreme crisis that reigned in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and there was a state of widespread famine that many compare to the current period.

“During the ‘special period,’ the number of children per woman fell from 1.8 to 1.6, and this changed the reproductive model of Cuban society as it was a constant crisis over time,” says Albizu-Campos.

Elaine Acosta, PhD, a research assistant at Florida International University, USA, observes that Cuba “leads aging processes in Latin America” ​​because its demographic pyramid is more similar to that of a European country.

“Even when compared with what is happening in European societies, the jump between 1970 and today was even more stunning in Cuba, where the elderly population grew from 9% to 20% of the total,” he says.

However, he finds the combination of a population pyramid similar to that of a developed country over the past 25 years with the gradual deterioration of well-being and human development levels problematic.

According to him, this last problem not only contributed to the decline in fertility, but also fed another factor that explained the population stagnation on the island: immigration.

migration

It is estimated that around one million Cubans have left the country in the last 25 years.

According to official US records, more than 800,000 of them emigrated to the United States.

The flow was between 30,000 and 70,000 immigrants per year until the outbreak, but only in the first nine months of 2022 200,000 Cubans reached the North American country; Mariel in 1980 (when 125,000 Cubans left the island in just 7 months), or the rafting crisis during the “special period”.

“The uncontrolled rise in inflation, the fall in the real value of wages and pensions, food insecurity, drug shortages and deterioration of housing, among others, have reduced welfare levels to private-period-like minimums, but lower levels of social protection and greater political tension and public in an environment of dissatisfaction,” he explains.

“All of this is affecting thousands of young people and even the elderly to join the immigration confluence that started again with the reopening of flights in November 2021.”

Will it drop to 10 million?

This means that after 25 years of stagnation, the Cuban population could begin a downward trend, especially if we take into account that most of the immigrants are young people or people of childbearing age who will have children outside of the island.

Demographer Albizu-Campos had predicted years ago that Cuba’s population would return to 10 million by 2030, and that all baby boomers of the 1960s would be in old age.

However, the process appears to be accelerating and the 11 million drop could come this year as records are updated with new data on births, deaths and migrants.

“The inverse combination between continued immigration and an increase in deaths may indicate that we are getting close to lowering this rating,” says the expert.

The demographic landscape is even more complex for 2050, when more than 3.7 million Cubans will be over the age of 60, out of an estimated population of 10.1 million, according to United Nations projections.

Of these, about 1.3 million will be older than 80 years old.

Elaine Acosta also notes that these projections were formulated prior to the current migration crisis.

“As a result, population shrinkage may be larger than expected.”