Cuba's demographic dependency ratio rose to 733 in 2025

The National Office of Statistics and Information placed Cuba's demographic dependency ratio at 733 in 2025: for every 1,000 residents in the working-age group, there were that many people in potentially dependent age groups. The indicator stood at 681 in 2023 and 710 in 2024. It is calculated by comparing people under 15 and those 60 or older with the population ages 15 to 59. This age-based relationship does not measure how many people are employed or how many actually need assistance.

The territorial breakdown places Villa Clara at the high end among provinces, with a rate of 792, compared with Artemisa's low of 689. The gap among municipalities was wider: Havana's Plaza de la Revolucion led the ranking at 943, while Antilla in Holguin had the lowest figure at 478. All of these figures express the same relationship among age groups, applied separately to each territory.

People age 60 or older account for 26.7 percent of Cuba's population, the largest share for that age group in Latin America and the Caribbean. Other indicators accompany that aging trend: in 2025, fertility stood at 1.29 children per woman, compared with the replacement level of 2.1, while net migration was negative by 245,264 people. The population decline accumulated since 2020 exceeds 1.6 million residents amid the departure of young people and a shrinking working-age population.

In an interview in October, Juan Carlos Alfonso, a demographer and deputy head of ONEI, called for public planning to incorporate population changes. He said programs continued to be designed without sufficiently accounting for the loss of roughly 1.5 million residents over four or five years. For Alfonso, the central challenge is not only how many people live in Cuba, but how they are distributed by age and how they can be supported.

Care work also reflects inequalities between women and men. ONEI argues that those duties should be shared to prevent a disproportionate burden on women, who spend more time performing them without pay. The release of the figures coincided with the November 5 international observance dedicated to caregivers, intended to highlight the gender dimension of the country's demographic challenges.

Alfonso listed the creation of small childcare centers and spaces within companies for older adults among the current responses, together with a comprehensive care policy. Decree 109/2024, meanwhile, established a national system to organize these services, with implementation planned from 2026 through 2030. These measures address protection and social-security needs associated with the composition of the population.

As those initiatives move forward, the network of Casas de Abuelos, or daytime senior-care centers, has fewer facilities. There were 375 centers in operation in 2021, compared with 307 in 2026, a loss of 68 facilities serving older adults over that period. The contraction in infrastructure accompanies the difficulty of organizing care for an aging population with a smaller labor base because of emigration and low birth rates.