Sitting on a stoop in old Havana, Marta says her daughter, who lives in Germany, will not return to Cuba. “She has issues with the government,” the 75-year-old says. “I’m all alone. I haven’t seen my daughter or my granddaughters in two years.”
Marta is one of the many older Cubans left behind as younger generations emigrate from Cuba in record numbers. After a revolutionary government led by Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, Cuba experienced some of Latin America’s lowest poverty rates and highest levels of education; while subsidised food and free healthcare pushed life expectancy on par with the United States and Europe.
Raised to believe in a social pact built on equality and inclusion, many older Cubans are now facing a lonely retirement as the country’s economy sinks deeper into crisis, worsened by a US oil blockade intended to pressure the government in Havana.
When Consuela Tenela (75) took early retirement in 2004 from her job as an English teacher, her pension was enough to live on, she says, but inflation that began to spiral at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed many goods out of reach for her. Her monthly state pension is now worth the equivalent of €5.50. “It’s not enough,” she says. “I’m lucky I don’t need clothes.”
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Almost 40 per cent of retirees in Cuba live on a similar pension to Tenela. Cuban economist Mayra Espina says: “The collapse of Cuba’s economy can be traced to the United States’ six-decade embargo, the communist state’s moribund central planning and a failure to recover from the pandemic.”
These intersecting crises pushed many young Cubans to leave, with the island losing an estimated 13 per cent of its population since 2012.
Cuba now has one of the oldest populations in Latin America, with Cubans over 60 expected to make up more than a third of the population by 2050, according to Cuba’s National Office of Statistics and Information. The rising cost of fuel and electricity blackout are affecting the entire country but weigh heaviest on its older people.
Cuban municipalities typically run a programme for elderly Cubans living alone, which provides three meals a day at low cost. According to Cuba’s ministry of work and social security, nearly a fifth of Cubans over 60 live alone.
One municipal kitchen in La Palma that The Irish Times visited offers a lunch of rice, potatoes and bread for the equivalent of a fraction of a cent to elderly people living alone in the local area. But resources within this meal system are “very limited”, says Luis, a Franciscan brother in Havana.
He says the state system for distributing subsidised food is also in crisis. “People are supposed to receive things like milk and rice, but sometimes they only receive one pound of rice,” Luis says. “One pound of rice gives maybe 12 small portions.”
The lack of access to basic food has driven some Cubans to scavenge through the uncollected garbage piling up on the streets in Havana amid the fuel crisis.
Many Cubans have begun to resent the growing inequality and visible deprivation, as citizens are divided into those with and without access to foreign currency.
“Some people who have family abroad can send them more money than others; they live better,” says Tenela in her modest apartment in the working-class neighbourhood of Cerro. “People change ... They feel superior because they have more things than you. I am the same with one peso or one million.”
Since her husband died 24 years ago, Vivana Soto (74) has lived alone in the house her family built in Havana’s October 10th neighbourhood in the 1940s, when Cuba was a Caribbean playground for visiting Americans.
Then, her father earned enough from working in the import-export business for the family to go on holidays to the US and for Soto to attend a private school, which closed after the revolution in 1959.
Now, Soto lives off her late husband’s monthly pension worth €3.70 and food parcels sent by her daughter in Florida. Her son lives in Spain but as he has only emigrated a few years ago, Soto says she doesn’t want to burden him with requests for money or medicine as he builds a new life.
She spends most of her time at home messaging friends and family who live outside Cuba.
“I don’t have grand aspirations,” says Soto. “That’s the one good thing about living without hope, it is tough but you get used to having less and less each day. There comes a point where you’re happy to just be living. We got used to that because of the revolution.”
But the fuel crisis is threatening the bubble Soto has created in her Havana neighbourhood. Some companies in Florida that shipped food and goods packages from Cubans in the United States to their relatives in Cuba are reducing or cancelling their services due to fuel shortages.
Soto says: “We are a lot of elderly people, retired with miserable pensions that are still alive thanks to those packages or to the money our children send.”
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