Cuba's Own Statistics Office Confirms: Twice as Many Funerals as Births in 2025

Since Cuba's National Office of Statistics and Information published its 2025 population data through the state outlet Cubadebate on Thursday, August 20, the numbers have been dissected across Spanish-language and American outlets. The headline figure: 136,214 deaths against only 68,064 births last year, meaning Cuba buried nearly twice as many people as it welcomed.

That's a gap of 68,150 just from births and deaths, before anyone even left the island. Once emigration is factored in, the picture worsens. According to Cubadebate's figures, cited by EFE and Infobae, Cuba's population fell by 313,414 people between 2024 and 2025, landing at an effective population of 9,434,593. The country's growth rate now sits at negative 32.7 per thousand.

Emigration, not death, is doing most of the damage. Cuban outlet CiberCuba reported that 245,264 people left the island in 2025 alone, the dominant force behind the population drop. Diego Enrique González Galbán, director of ONEI's Center for Population and Development Studies, acknowledged directly that "the most significant impact on the demographic structure is exerted by emigration," according to CiberCuba. This represents a direct admission from a government statistician working for a one-party state that has spent decades insisting people leave for economic opportunity, not because of the system itself.

Cuba's Total Fertility Rate held at 1.29 children per woman for the second straight year, the lowest since 1958, according to figures reported identically across Cubadebate, Infobae, La Silla Rota, and OnCuba News. Replacement level is 2.1. The Gross Reproduction Rate, the average number of daughters a woman has in her lifetime, is just 0.62. This fertility collapse is not new.

More than a quarter of the country, 26.7 percent, is now 60 or older, per ONEI. The median age is 45. In Havana's Plaza de la Revolución municipality, 38.2 percent of residents are 60-plus, according to multiple outlets citing the same ONEI report.

The working-age population fell from 6,866,435 people in 2021 to 5,606,541 in 2025, a drop of nearly 1.26 million in just five years, according to ONEI data reported by both Breitbart and Latin American Post. That's the group that's supposed to be paying into pensions and staffing hospitals for an aging population. It's shrinking fast.

Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos, writing for Columbia Law School's Horizonte Cubano, argues the government's own presentations obscure more than they reveal. He notes officials didn't disclose the actual 2025 death count in some presentations, nor explain "the factors or causes underlying" the rise in deaths. He also flagged that Cuba's 2023 death toll of 129,049 was only made public after an Associated Press journalist pressed a senior ONEI official for the number, and that figure was later revised downward.

Albizu-Campos also points out that Cuba's 2024 birth count, 71,374, represents a regression to levels not seen since 1899, when the island recorded 74,079 births. He attributes part of the fertility drop to what he calls a "Malthusianism of Poverty," a coping response to what he describes as a systemic economic crisis, compounded by the fact that 80 percent of emigrants are women of childbearing age, at a ratio of 133 women leaving for every 100 men.

CiberCuba's reporting on public reaction to Thursday's Cubadebate post captured the mood on the ground. One commenter wrote "And why could that be?" Another: "When people emigrate, rulers become unnecessary." CiberCuba also cited survey data from Observa Cuba showing 93 percent of Cubans say they would leave the country immediately if they could.

The official Cubadebate report, and the coverage that followed in Infobae, La Silla Rota, and OnCuba News, frames the crisis in demographic terms. Aging, low fertility, and calls on experts from ONEI's Center for Population and Development Studies and the UN Population Fund to design policies suited to an older, shrinking population dominate the coverage. None of those reports name blackouts, shortages, wages, or political freedom as causes. CiberCuba is the outlet that connects those dots directly, noting the state report "refrains from pointing out the political and economic causes driving this exodus: prolonged blackouts, chronic shortages, insufficient wages, and the absence of freedoms."

Guantánamo, the one province bucking the trend somewhat, still lost population, just at a slower rate, 22.9 per thousand versus Havana's 43.9, according to ONEI figures reported across Spanish-language outlets.

The unresolved question is what, if anything, the Cuban government does next. ONEI's own demographer has now publicly conceded emigration is the primary driver of the collapse. Whether that admission translates into any policy change addressing the reasons Cubans are leaving, rather than just adapting pension and healthcare systems to a shrinking, aging population, remains to be seen.