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Cuba is facing an unprecedented demographic crisis in its modern history: according to data presented by researchers from the Center for Demographic Studies (CEDEM) at the conversation held on World Population Day on Saturday, 50% of those who left the island by the end of 2024 were young people and children under the age of 35.
The data is especially alarming because this segment represents only 38.4% of the total population, highlighting a disproportionate drain of the most productive and reproductive group in the country.
“At the end of 2024, 50% of the individuals who left the country were young people and infants under 35 years old,” warned Arelis Rosalen Mora Pérez, a researcher at CEDEM, who described that group as “a reserve that is on the move.”
The researcher specified that the group aged 30 to 34 is the largest within the Cuban population pyramid, while the group aged zero to four years is the least represented, a direct consequence of the collapse in birth rates.
Cuba opened 2026 with 9,436,440 inhabitants, a figure that contrasts with the 11.3 million in 2020 and reflects the combined impact of three simultaneous phenomena: more deaths than births, and more emigrants than immigrants.
The decline in birth rates is staggering. From about 99,000 births in 2021, the country went on to register only 68,051 in 2025, the lowest figure in decades, compared to 134,354 deaths in the same year.
More than 250,000 Cubans officially emigrated in 2024, although independent estimates raise the actual number to over 545,000 for that year. Since 2021, more than one million people have left the island.
Aging is progressing in parallel: 25.7% of the Cuban population is over 60 years old, the highest proportion in Latin America, with projections reaching 39.7% by 2050.
The UN warned this month that, if current trends continue, Cuba could have a population of 5.6 million by 2100.
In this context, researchers from CEDEM also pointed out a critical paradox: adolescent fertility. In 2024, the rate was 47.1 births per 1,000 adolescents aged 15 to 19, and although it decreased slightly, its relative weight in the country's total fertility increased because the rest of the fertile age groups are either emigrating or not having children.
Matilde Molina Cintra, deputy director of CEDEM, described teenage pregnancy as a social problem that extends beyond health issues.
"Pregnancy forces the teenager to break away from what should be a normal part of enjoying life at this age; it is a loss of social, educational, and health opportunities," she stated.
Molina Cintra also warned about the persistence of early unions, often with adults, which undermine the sexual and reproductive rights of minors.
"If we pass laws, we must begin to enforce them," she emphasized, referring to Law 178/2025, which recognizes the State's duty to prevent pregnancy in childhood and adolescence.
Cuban youth who remain on the island also do not seem to see it as a project for the future.
Antonio Aja Díaz, director of CEDEM, emphasized that demographic dynamics demand "a migration policy in which the right is not just to migrate, but the right not to have to do so."
For Aja Díaz, the key is that young people "those who are here today, those who are born and grow up, see themselves represented in the national project," because only that representation "will lead them to participate, to be the protagonists."
However, six decades of communist dictatorship have drained that promise of meaning for entire generations of Cubans.
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