Cuba's Population Free-Fall Isn't Slowing — 1.6 Million Gone Since 2020

People stand next to their luggage outside the Ferrocarriles de Cuba train station in Havana on June 16, 2026. New restrictions on interprovincial transport in Cuba come into force on June 18, 2026, with trains running every 16 days, few weekly coaches and a state system for allocating tickets according to criteria of "urgency", amid a severe fuel shortage, under pressure from Washington. (Credit: Photo by YAMIL LAGE / AFP via Getty Images)

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.