Carmen was once known in the neighborhood of Mulgoba, in the Boyeros municipality of Havana, as "Carmen the Fat." Today, her neighbor Alexis Torriente describes her with a phrase that summarizes the neglect of an entire generation: "Carmen the Fat,.. who is no longer fat at all."
Torriente posted on Facebook a report detailing the complete cycle of the institutional collapse in Cuba: Carmen suffers from a cerebral ischemia, struggles to feed her sick child, and didn't have money even for a haircut. A hairdresser was asking for 300 pesos. "I don’t have a single cent," she replied.
But Carmen's case is not just about poverty. It paints a picture of a system that promised to protect her but has abandoned her. She has been waiting for over a year for a response from her assigned social worker. In the video accompanying the post, Carmen herself recounts the response she received: "I'll let you know, it's just that it takes time to come through." Her reply says it all: "But when does it take time? When you die? By the time I die, it won’t matter anymore."
Torriente directly points to the municipal government of Boyeros: "The social workers and the corrupt officials of the Boyeros government involved in these matters, as well as those responsible in the neighborhood who should visit and be aware of these cases, have never done anything." He also denounces that the state-run dining halls meant for the most vulnerable "have become a business, in addition to the theft of the little that is allocated to these cases."
This individual abandonment reflects a structural crisis of historic proportions. The 80% of Cubans believe that the current situation is worse than the Special Period of the 1990s, according to data from March 2026.
The statistics on senior citizens are devastating. The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights documented at the end of 2025 that 79% of people over 70 years old cannot have the three main meals of the day due to a lack of food or money. The 99% of retirees report that their pension does not cover basic needs for food, housing, and medicine, even after the increase announced in September 2025 that raised the minimum pension to 4,000 Cuban pesos, equivalent to less than 10 dollars at the informal exchange rate. A carton of eggs costs more than 3,000 pesos, almost 75% of that monthly pension.
Cuban Vice President Salvador Valdés Mesa himself acknowledged the magnitude of the problem in 2025: "Our retirees have average pensions of 1,525 pesos. You can't live on that; with an average salary of 5,000 pesos, you can't live, nor with 6,000 pesos... You can't live given the prices today."
The demographic factor exacerbates the situation exponentially. Cuba is the oldest country in Latin America and the Caribbean, with 25.7% of its population over 60 years old by the end of 2024 and a median age of 42.2 years, the highest on the continent. Massive emigration—over a million people since 2021, mostly young individuals—has left the elderly without family support networks, while the state lacks the resources to fill that gap. By 2030, it is projected that those over 60 will make up 30% of the population, approximately 3.3 million people.
The historical paradox is striking. The system of social workers was created by Fidel Castro on September 10, 2000, precisely as a response to the social collapse of the Special Period, with the promise to be, in his own words, "the sacred duty to demonstrate all that a just, supportive, and truly humane society can achieve."
Twenty-five years later, that same system is identified as part of the problem: workers who do not make visits, who make promises without following through, and who are part of a chain of complicity that includes corruption in state-run cafeterias.
In February 2026, the Cuban government authorized private companies and cooperatives to open residences for the elderly, implicitly acknowledging the collapse of the state care system. Torriente, however, points to a harsher conclusion: "The government that punishes its people with hunger should be judged, but unfortunately, there is no justice in Cuba. Only the people save the people."
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