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An elderly woman with a fractured arm, barely held in place by a sling due to the lack of plaster, and suffering from unbearable toothache, stood in line at a Cuban bank to cash two months' worth of accumulated pension.
The box only paid one of the two checks —2,200 pesos— claiming that it did not have authorization to pay both on the same day. She left crying.
The story was published this Wednesday on Facebook by Yulieta Hernández Díaz, an engineer and director of the private company Pilares Construcciones, and within a few hours it became a reflection of the crisis facing the elderly on the island.
The testimony recounts two situations that occurred on the same day. While Yulieta's husband witnessed the scene at the bank, she was waiting in an Identity Card office where power outages had halted the entire day: people who arrived before dawn waited until four in the afternoon without any electricity.
It was there that a second grandmother arrived, walking from more than ten kilometers away. The officials, already close to closing time, did not want to assist her. Yulieta had to intervene. The response was that she should return "tomorrow... or the day after... or as many times as necessary, until there was electricity."
"She told me that she hadn't been able to collect her pension for several months. That she no longer had the strength to keep going back. That she had practically not eaten," Yulieta wrote.
The author gave her money for food and promised to help her the next day with the queue. "She didn't want to accept it. She was crying out of embarrassment. It took me some convincing," she recounted.
What Yulieta describes is not an exception. The minimum pension in Cuba is 4,000 pesos per month since September 2025, equivalent to just seven or eight dollars at the informal exchange rate. A carton of 30 eggs costs between 3,000 and 4,000 pesos, meaning it consumes nearly the entire pension.
The economist Javier Pérez Capdevila estimates that covering basic needs requires at least 96,060 pesos per month, of which 70,070 correspond only to food. The gap between what retirees receive and what they need to survive is staggering.
A survey by ASIC of 506 retirees revealed that 99% of Cuban retirees state that their pension does not cover food, housing, or medications, and 98.8% feel institutional abandonment. Among those over 70 years old, 79% are unable to have three meals a day.
Bureaucracy and power outages further exacerbate the situation. In June 2026, the government of Granma admitted it did not have sufficient funds to pay its 111,000 retirees. In March 2026, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security acknowledged that "there are no resources to support vulnerable individuals."
Cuba has only 156 nursing homes with 12,697 beds for more than 1.7 million registered retirees, and 51 municipalities lack any elderly care services.
The odyssey of Cuban seniors to collect their pension repeats itself every month in endless lines, offices without electricity, and windows that send them back to return.
Yulieta clarified in her post that she is not writing to point fingers at any particular institution: "I lost hope a long time ago that this will change anything." Her appeal is for solidarity among Cubans: "Most of our elderly do not have Internet access, and many do not have family. A kind word costs nothing. Giving up a turn can ease someone's suffering."
By the end of 2025, 89% of the Cuban population lives in extreme poverty, according to the Cuban Observatory for Citizen Audit. "More than 90% of the population, over eight million people, today live in conditions of poverty or misery," Yulieta herself wrote, summarizing in one sentence the magnitude of a crisis that the regime has been constructing for decades.
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