HAVANA — It's not outside critics driving Cuba's latest population warning — it's the government's own number-crunchers. At a June 29 meeting inside the UN's Havana headquarters, Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, deputy chief of the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), told assembled ministries, demographers and members of the Demographic Dynamics Commission that Cuba's population dropped from roughly 11 million at the close of 2020 to about 9.4 million by the end of 2025, a loss topping 1.6 million people in five years. The figures were relayed by the state magazine Bohemia and independently corroborated by DiarioDeCuba and Cubanet.
"There is no similar experience," Alfonso Fraga told the room — adding that no Global South nation has contracted this sharply outside of wartime.
The session was the first Cuba visit, in her current post, for Paula Narváez, UNFPA's regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean and a former cabinet spokeswoman under Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. She framed Cuba's trajectory as part of a broader regional pattern of aging populations, but described the island's pace as without regional parallel, according to both Bohemia.
The number that traveled furthest: if nothing changes, Cuba could be down to roughly 5.6 million residents by century's end — about half its size from five years earlier. That figure isn't just an internal Cuban estimate. Outside modeling lines up closely: Our World in Data's rendering of UN population prospects puts Cuba at 5.577 million by 2100, while georank.org separately calculates a 48.6% decline from current levels to about the same figure.
Falling births are compounding the losses. ONEI logged 71,358 births in 2024 — among the lowest annual totals in the island's modern history, and a figure that closely tracks the agency's own earlier preliminary count of 71,374 births for that year, disclosed back in February 2025. Fertility-rate trackers place Cuba anywhere between 1.29 and 1.6 children per woman depending on the year and source — in every case far short of the 2.1 needed to hold a population steady, per estimates compiled by Our World in Data and the University of Navarra's Global Affairs desk. Roughly a quarter or more of Cubans are now 60 or older, and deaths are running well ahead of births.
Emigration remains the single biggest driver of the shrinkage. Cuban authorities logged 251,221 departures in 2024, but demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos argues the true number topped 545,000 once destinations beyond the U.S. are counted — putting Cuba's actual resident population closer to eight million, well under the official tally, according to his study as reported by CiberCuba and profiled separately by the University of Navarra.
The warning lands days after President Miguel Díaz-Canel downplayed the exodus in a televised interview, calling emigration a global phenomenon and attributing it mainly to young people's greater energy and appetite for risk, without mentioning low wages, blackouts or scarce opportunity. A separate outlet, Periodico Cubano, reports he also pointed to the appeal of capitalist economies abroad.
Havana has had a national policy aimed at slowing the aging trend and lifting birth rates since 2014, but officials at the June 29 meeting said the shortfall isn't a policy gap so much as a failure to move fast enough amid a collapsing economy, according to Bohemia and DiarioDeCuba. Adding to the uncertainty, Cuba hasn't completed a census since 2012; a count delayed repeatedly for lack of funds finally began this year but won't yield results until 2027.
Even the baseline is contested: Cuba's own government count already sits roughly 1.5 million below what standard UN demographic models — the same ones underpinning the 5.6-million 2100 projection — still assume the island's population to be today, per figures from Our World in Data and georank.org. Whichever number is closer to reality, both point toward a country emptying out faster than nearly anywhere else on record.
