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.
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.
...
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.
...
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.
From the article:
...
...
...