By Ayose Naranjo and Norlys Perez
HAVANA, June 10 (Reuters) – When Sagrado Armando Garcia, an 85-year-old former government bureaucrat, collapsed in his home, his son couldn’t get him to the hospital because he didn’t have fuel for the family car, he said. At other times recently, there have been moments when Garcia felt so dizzy with hunger he thought he might fall again.
Garcia spent decades working at Cuba’s Ministry of Social Security, believing in a system that promised to shield people in old age. That sense of security has vanished.
“They are leaving us to our fate,” he said.
Cuba has struggled for years under punishing U.S. economic sanctions to deliver on Fidel Castro’s promise that its communist government would provide basic services for workers: subsidized food, healthcare, education, public transportation, and pensions.
Now the country’s seniors – long accustomed to failing public services, power outages and chronic shortages of food and medicine – face even harsher conditions after the Trump administration’s move in late January to cut off the island’s fuel supply.
A U.S. State Department spokesperson referred Reuters to recent testimony from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who blames Cuba’s woes on internal corruption and mismanagement and not U.S. sanctions.
“Cuba was having blackouts well before January 3rd of this year, for two reasons: they were no longer getting free oil from Venezuela, and they did not invest a single dollar back into their plants,” the spokesperson said, citing Rubio. “Cuba is a mess.”
AGING POPULATION AT HIGH RISK
Pensions have shrunk to the equivalent of $7 a month on the black-market exchange, as the peso has lost about a third of its value against the dollar since the start of the blockade.
The Cuban government has appealed to the United Nations World Food Programme for aid so it can continue providing two meals a day to the vulnerable and the elderly.
Cuba is the fastest-aging nation in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than a quarter of its population is over 60, according to the Cuban government statistics agency, driven by a plummeting birthrate and a mass exodus of young people. The population has dwindled to less than 10 million since 2021, a 10% decline.
Etienne Labande, the WFP representative in Havana, said the combination of high prices and shrinking pensions and rations has put many seniors in a perilous situation, unable to afford enough food or medical care.
“This is a very high-risk population right now, a situation that worsened starting in January,” he told Reuters. “Inflation has skyrocketed, there’s no public transportation, and getting around costs a lot of money.”
The Ministry of Internal Commerce, which oversees public food kitchens, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cuba’s public healthcare system, long seen as a great achievement of communist rule, has declined under years of sanctions.
The number of doctors in Cuba fell by 30% between 2019 and 2024, according to Cuban government figures – the most recent year of publicly available data – while 70% of essential medicines were either scarce or completely unavailable.
The waiting list for surgeries is expected to hit 160,000 patients by the end of the year, a 60% increase, according to the Cuban health ministry. Most drugs, including blood pressure medications, are in short supply, doctors told Reuters.
On an island where the average monthly income is around $15, even small sums of money sent by relatives abroad make a difference.
For elderly Cubans who don’t receive remittances from abroad, conditions are especially tight.
“In this crisis that Cuba has been experiencing since January, the elderly are most affected,” Bryan Arbuelles, a member of the clergy at the San Juan de Letran church in Havana, said. “They are people who worked for decades but whose pension is now not enough to live on.”
He added: “The outlook is terrible.”
Regina Zaida Jorge, a 74-year-old retired doctor who lives alone in the former servants’ quarters of a once-regal old house, receives no money from outside Cuba.
Her tiny apartment has no running water, and she is forced to lug it from a rooftop cistern each day. She said she gets by on government rations and food handouts from the Catholic Church.
“The policies here were designed to guarantee the basics,” she said. “But deep down they are cosmetic measures, to keep you alive. You have to forget about aspiring to have a television, a telephone; the pension isn’t enough for anything.”
She said she had given “everything” as a low-paid state worker to a system incapable of providing her with necessities as basic as a bar of soap.
Now that she is a pensioner scrabbling to get by, she said, “I feel like I sacrificed myself in vain.”
Last year, U.S. sanctions prompted top money transfer company Western Union to halt services to Cuba.
Some still find a way to get an external cash injection.
Sonia Belmonte Puebla, 73, receives small amounts of money in dollars from a daughter in Florida.
Unlike many of her generation, she said she is enjoying her old age, living independently at home with her husband with little need for state assistance.
“I can treat myself now and then and eat well,” Belmonte said.
(Reporting by Ayose Naranjo and Norlys Perez in Havana, additional reporting and editing by Dave Sherwood, Christian Plumb and Suzanne Goldenberg)
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