Communist-run Cuba’s demographic crisis reached a grim new milestone in 2025, with the island’s official statistics office recording twice as many deaths as births, according to reports published Friday. The figures, released by Cuba’s National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) and carried by state media outlet Cubadebate, show the nation registered 136,214 deaths against just 68,064 births last year — a ratio that underscores the accelerating collapse of Cuba’s population.
The numbers represent the latest chapter in a nine-year streak of population decline driven by record-low birth rates, a rapidly aging populace, and an ongoing exodus of hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing the communist system. According to the Associated Press, ONEI confirmed that Cuba lost three percent of its population between 2024 and 2025 — a drop of more than 300,000 people from the figure the agency disclosed in July.
Havana’s Disparity
The disparity between deaths and births was even more pronounced in the capital, Havana, where authorities recorded 29,646 deaths and only 10,323 births — meaning deaths nearly tripled births in the city. Other provinces with notably high death tolls included Santiago de Cuba, Holguín, Camagüey, and Villa Clara, according to the statistics published by Cubadebate.
Cuban state media acknowledged that the nation’s population is aging at an “unstoppable pace,” with a median age of 45. More than 2.5 million Cubans — 26.7 percent of the population — are now over the age of 60. In the Havana municipality of Plaza de la Revolución, a staggering 38.2 percent of residents are 60 or older, the highest proportion in the country.
Shrinking Workforce
The demographic freefall has decimated Cuba’s working-age population, which has fallen by over 1.25 million people in recent years — from 6.86 million in 2021 to 5.6 million in 2025. This decline in the labor pool threatens to further cripple an economy already battered by food shortages, blackouts, and the government’s repressive policies.
Cuba’s Gross Reproduction Rate — the average number of daughters a woman would have during her childbearing years — now stands at just 0.62. The Total Fertility Rate was measured at 1.29 children per woman, the worst result since 1958, the last year before the communist revolution. ONEI also reported that the remaining population has a gender imbalance of 972 males for every 1,000 females, a ratio that drops to 921 males per 1,000 females in rural areas.
Cubadebate attributed the “overrepresentation of women” to their “greater access to higher education and employment in the service sector, as well as the feminization of internal migration to cities.”
Experts Recommend ‘Demographic Resilience’
Specialists from the regime’s Center for Population and Development Studies and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) have recommended a policy of “demographic resilience,” which Cubadebate described as aiming to ensure “the population is neither too large nor too small.” The vague recommendation, however, appears to sidestep the systemic issues driving Cuba’s demographic collapse.
That view is echoed by Cuban demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos, who warned last week in an interview with Martí Noticias that Cuba has entered a complete “demographic disaster” scenario. Albizu-Campos argued that the drop in population is not an isolated statistical phenomenon but a symptom of a broader crisis encompassing the nation’s economy, food supply, health care, and social fabric — compounded by what he called the “loss of future expectations” among Cubans.
“Many Cuban women do not want to have children in the country’s current conditions, and some even contemplate emigrating to have them outside of Cuba,” Albizu-Campos told Martí Noticias.
The demographer cautioned that if current trends persist, Cuba will face a “demographic emptying” that could extend through 2030. He stressed that simply hitting certain birth and mortality targets will not solve the problem. Instead, Albizu-Campos called for a “profound transformation” of Cuba’s political, economic, and judicial systems.
“The solution must be that the model, in some way, has to change,” he said.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2026/08/21/cuba-records-twice-many-deaths-births-2025/