A brief note on the demographic prospects of Cuba

Over at my blog this evening, I posted an article reflecting on the evidence for substantial economic decline in Cuba under Castro, not only decline relative to its peers (southern and central Europe, high-income Latin America) but even, at times, of absolute decline. A country that had severe problems of inequality went on to acquire worse problems. Of all the economies in the world to be transformed into autarkic socialist states, Cuba’s highly-export dependent economy may have been among the least suited. Blogger and economist Noel Maurer has pointed to one study suggesting that Cuba's potential GDP per capita may well have been halved.

On my RSS feed this weekend, I came across Tyler Cowen's pessimistic forecast for post-Castro Cuba's economic future.

One way to approach Cuba’s economic fate is to consider the Caribbean region as a whole. For the most part, it has seen mediocre results since the financial crisis of 2008. Economic problems have plagued Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Jamaica, Haiti and Barbados, with only Jamaica seeing a real turnaround.

The core problems of the region include high debt, weak commodity prices, lack of economies of scale and an inability to upgrade tourist facilities to compete with the U.S., Mexico and further-flung locales. Cuba cannot service its foreign debt, and losing most of its support from Venezuela has been a massive fiscal problem.

Perhaps the country most like Cuba in the Caribbean, in terms of history, heritage and ethnic composition, is the Dominican Republic. Currently, it has a nominal gross domestic product of somewhat over $6,000 per capita, depending which source you prefer. That’s far from the bottom tier of developing economies, but it’s hardly a shining star. And Cuba will take a long time to attract a comparable level of multinational investment, or to develop its tourist facilities to a comparable level of sophistication. Well-functioning electricity and air conditioning cannot be taken for granted in Cuba, especially after the major decline in energy supplies from Venezuela.

[. . .]

If you are wondering, the World Bank measures Cuban GDP at over $6,000 per capita, but that is based on a planned economy and an unrealistic exchange rate. In reality, Cuba probably is richer than Nicaragua, where GDP per capital is approximately $2,000, but we don’t know by how much. Cuba does have relatively high levels of health care and education, but we’ve learned from post-Soviet reform experiences that it is easy for a nation to lose those advantages. There are already shortages of many basic health care items, including medical technology and antibiotics.

Cuba's demographic issues, including sustained sub-replacement fertility and substantial emigration, will not aid in the economic transformation of the country. If anything, they may make things more difficult, as Cubans who can leave for destinations where they think they can prosper. Might the Donald Trump presidency inadvertently aid Cuba, I wonder, by making Cuban immigration to the United States more difficult? Or would even that be enough to make things less difficult for Cuba? In a time where skilled labour is increasingly at a premium, Cubans may have their pick of destinations? For more, see this blog's past posts about Cuba's particular issues. I have to say that our pessimistic arguments seem to have good ones.

Some followups

For tonight's post, I thought I'd share a few news links revisiting old stories

• The Guardian notes that British citizens of more, or less, recent Irish ancestry are looking for Irish passports so as to retain access to the European Union in the case of Brexit. (Net migration to the United Kingdom is up and quite strong, while Cameron's crackdown on non-EU migrants has led to labour shortages.
• NPR notes one strategy to get fathers to take parental leave: Have them see other fathers take it.
• Reuters notes that the hinterland of Fukushima, depopulated by natural and nuclear disaster, seems set to have been permanently depopulated. Tohoku
• Bloomberg noted that East Asia's populations are aging rapidly, another article noting how Japan's demographic dynamics are setting a pattern for other high-income East Asian economies.
• In Malaysia, the Star notes that low population growth among Malaysian Chinese will lead to a sharp fall in the Chinese proportion in the Malaysian population by 2040.
• Coming to Alberta, CBC notes how the municipality of Fort McMurray has been hit very hard by the end of the oil boom, as has been Alberta's largest city and business centre of Calgary.
• On the subject of North Korea and China, The Guardian wrote about the stateless children born to North Korean women in China, lacking either Chinese or North Korean citizenship.
• The Inter Press Service notes that, as the Dominican Republic cracks down on Haitian migrants and people of Haitian background generally, women are in a particular situation.
• IWPR provides updates on Georgia's continuing and ongoing rate of population shrinkage, a consequence of emigration.
• On the subject of Cuba, the Inter Press Service reported on Cuban migrants to the United States stranded in Latin America, while Agence France-Presse looked at the plight of Cuba's growing cohort of elderly.

Four Al Jazeera links on migration

I've been sitting on four news articles from Al Jazeera for some time. More original content will be coming tonight, but I wanted to get these out first.

In "Cuban migration surges after thaw in US-Cuba relations", Al Jazeera reports that attempts at migration from Cuba to the United States have surged despite the improvement in relations. This makes sense, with all the new incentives to migrate, between the prospect of easier movement between the island and the major destination of its emigrants and the risk that Cubans might lose their special status.

Elizabeth Braw reported, meanwhile, on the surge in unaccompanied child migrants and refugees in Sweden from conflict areas. Attracted by Swedish generosity and apparently not facing serous opposition, their numbers are on the rise.

Alice Su observes, meanwhile, that the continuing legacies of the devastating Hamas war with Israel on top of deep poverty are starting to make mass emigration a thinkable possibility for the people of the Gaza Strip. With no opportunities at home and a rapidly growing workforce, what else is there to do?

Desperation is also the theme of Hamza Mohamed's report from Somaliland. Even though that unrecognized state is far more stable than the rest of Somalia, again, young Somalilanders see no option but to flee.

Notes on the demographic future of Cuba

In the past, Demography Matters has examined the demographic issues of Cuba at some length. In a August 2006, I noted that all of the predictions for Cuba expected rapid aging of the population, as a consequence of low fertility and sustained emigration, leading to substantial shrinkage of the country's workforce. In a July 2009 post, I noted that the Cuban population had already begun to shrink, and in a May 2010 post I argued that Cuba was missing too many opportunities for change, too many windows closing while it still had a relatively young population. The post-Communist example of Bulgaria was something I raised in 2006, with its spectre of incipient depopulation and the pre-existing example of massive Cuban emigration to the United States. Nothing that has happened since has convinced me this is not a plausible future for Cuba.

And now? Some of the announced changes by the United States, particularly the expanded volume of remittances that can be sent to Cuba by migrants and increased ease of movement and communication across the Florida Straits, might make provide greater incentives for migration. As a November 2014 Havana Times article noted, in the two decades after the Cold War a half-million Cubans emigrated to the United States. Why not more, if nothing else changes in Cuba?

I suspect that Cuba might not be coming to the last of its opportunities to get rich before it grows old. Will Cuba manage this transition in a new era of improved Cuban-American relations? One can only hope.

UPDATE: Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen argues that there are good reasons, including a vulnerable export sector, institutional weaknesses, and brain drain, to be skeptical of post-Communist Cuba's economic chances. (He also lists some reasons for hope, including high levels of human development, abundant natural resources, and a talented diaspora in the United States.)

Notes on Venezuela

The death yesterday of Hugo Chavez after a long battle with cancer leaves the Venezuela at a turning point. What will come of Venezuela?

Let's start by looking at the current state of the Venezuelan population.

The president of the National Statistics Institute (INE), Elias Eljuri, informed this Friday that the preliminary results of the 14th National Census of Population and Housing, carried out in the country by the end of last year, show that country's median is not anymore 18 years of age, but 26, which means that Venezuela is currently experiencing a "demographic transition era."

[. . .]

Results also showed a contraction of population's growth, which is 1.6%, according to preliminary data.

"We are living an interesting era of demographic transition ... Venezuela is now placed in the so-called third demographic group in which growth and mortality (currently, 5.1 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants)rates fell," he detailed.

Eljuri explained that such demographical ranking consists of four groups: the first group gathers countries with high birth and mortality rates (Haiti, for example); the second group is of countries with high birth rates and medium mortality rates (Nicaragua, Paraguay); third one consists of countries with low birth rates and low mortality rates (to which belongs Venezuela now, it was previously in the second); and the fourth and last group is that with a stagnation of population, very low birth rates, like those of developed countries.

In addition, he said that other characteristics of said trend are the increase of life expectancy (to an average of 74.3 years) and decrease of birth rates.

"As for fertility, the average of children per women has fallen to 2.3. Those elements are determined by each culture, (in Venezuela's case) women have started to work; therefore, the number of children has fallen," he said.

Other preliminary data announced by the INE is that current Venezuelan population is 27,150,095 inhabitants. Nonetheless, there is still about 5% of the data that has not been processed yet; that is to say, that Venezuelan population is about 28.8 million people.

Of the total processed so far 50.3% are women and the remaining 49.7% men; the role of women as chiefs of family rose from 24% to 39%; Venezuela's rates of marriages has fallen to 25% and couples living together without legalizing their union increased to 27.9%; there is a 36.4% of population that remains single.

Venezuela is a country that has seen rapid growth and transformation in the period since the Second World War. Going to the Penn World Table reveals that the country's populatiion grew from almost exactly five million people in 1950 to 27.2 million in 2010, significantly increasing its relative heft in terms of absolute numbers. (For comparison, Uruguay's population grew from 2.2 million to 3.3 million, a "mere" 50%, over the same time span.) This growth was the product of a high rate of natural increase supplemented by substantial immigration (more later). The Venezuelan economy has a history of substantially more mixed growth. The country's economic apogee came in 1957, when the country's oil boom allowed GDP per capita to reach 48% of the American level, making the country not only the richest country in Latin America but placing it on par with Italy and considerably in advance of Spain. Thereafter slow decline ensued, the oil boom in the 1970s briefly reversing the trend, with GDP per capita reaching a low point of 16% of the US level in 1999 before reversing and growing to a bit more than 25% by 2010. This particular economic history explains a few things about Venezuela's demographic history, especially its delayed demographic transition compared to other similarly prosperous Latin American countries in the immediate post-war era (Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba) and its recent history of substantial immigration.

As described in the INED-hosted review "The Demography of Latin America and the Caribbean since 1950" by Guzman et al, and also in Héctor Pérez-Brignoli's shorter overview, Latin American countries can be divided in three categories according to their relationship to the framework of the demographic transition. At one extreme are Argentina, Uruguay, and Cuba, three countries that had already experienced substantial declines in fertility before the Second World War after ongoing mortality declines, and which were beginning to trend towards low population growt and rapid aging. At the other are the least developed countries in the region (i.e. Bolivia in the Andes, Haiti in the Caribbean, Guatemala in Central America), countries where mortality has fallen sharply but fertility remains high. The remainder of Latin America--countries like Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and yes, Venezuela--saw fertility only begin to fall in the 1960s.

Why was Venezuela an anomaly among the other high-income countries of Latin America in its late demographic transition? Venezuela's high-income status only came after the Second World War, transforming the country as completely as (for instance) Saudi Arabia later. Human development lagged behind economic growth. In a thesis available online ("Essays on Fertility and the Economy in Venezuela"), Octavio Maza Duerto details the demographic history of post-Second World War Venezuela, noting in Chapter 1 that the death rate fell by more than two-thirds in the 1948-1966 period, from 12.8 deaths per thousand to 4.2, while infant mortality also began falling. TFRs increased from 5.5 children per woman in 1950 to a peak of 6.5 in 1967 before falling to the current fertility level slightly above replacement levels.

Venezuela's economic growth in the decades immediately after the oil boom also explains why this country became a significant destination for immigration, not only from neighbouring Colombia and points elsewhere in Latin America but from southern Europe as well. As noted above, at its peak Venezuela was as rich as Italy and richer than Spain. For skilled migrants, moving to Venezuela could make sense. In a 2009 post, Noel Maurer outlined this migration, and the assimilation of these migrants and their descendants into their community.

In the 1950s, Europeans migrated because of the oil boom. Roughly 450,000 people acquired legal permanent residence during this wave. The new democratic government in 1958 restricted migration (not unsurprisingly) and net migration turned negative during the period. Then in 1973, with the second oil boom, immigration again spiked upwards. By 1976, Venezuela had 270,000 resident Spaniards, 223,000 Italians, and 107,000 Portuguese. Now, these numbers have to be interpreted carefully: they also include, for example, 79,672 Americans, most of whom did not settle down permanently. Nor are the figures comparable with the permanent residency figures also presented above. But they are what we have.

In 1976, at its peak, the various European nationalities (counting only those born overseas, not their Venezuelan-born children) made up about 3 percent of Venezuela’s then-population of 13.1 million. It was a large migration, but it wasn’t transformative. On the other hand, it did transform the nature of the country’s elites. The European migrants were remarkably successful, going on to found myriads of small businesses. In fact, it has been the descendents of those migrants, mostly Italian, who suffered the most from the government’s recent nationalization of the oil service companies. (More on that in another post, when I’m feeling better.)

One interesting question about immigration is: how quickly (if at all) do the children of immigrants lose the cultural predilections of their parents? Jewish-Americans, for example, continue to vote Democratic at far higher numbers than their income or occupational status would predict. Does this apply to Venezuelans?

Francisco Rodríguez of Wesleyan and Rodrigo Wagner, a grad student here at Harvard, have used the Maisanta list to ask just that question. Maisanta, you’ll recall, was a list published by the Venezuelan government containing the names of everyone who had signed a 2004 recall petition against Hugo Chávez. The list contained ID numbers, which can be cross-referenced against income data in the Venezuelan Social Security Institute database. They then used people’s surnames to trace them back to various Italian regions. They had to eliminate non-regionally-specific surnbames like Rossi, Russo, Ferrari, Esposito, Bianchi, Romano, and Colombo. So, given all the potential objections to the methodology, what did they find?

Nothing. There is no relationship between the political predilections of their parents’ region-of-origin in Italy and the predilections of Italian-Venezuelan voters today. Inasmuch as Italian-Venezuelans have overwhelmingly achieved middle and upper-class status in Venezuela, they have also assimilated to the political predilections of those groups.

Immigration fell sharply from the 1980s on, as the Venezuelan economy continued to deteriorate. Especially since the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, the popular press has been filled with references to new emigration: see this 2002 New York Times article referring to southern European immigrants and their descendants returning; this 2007 Mercopress article citing a figure of 1.5 million Venezuelan emigrantsl this 2008 New York Times article talking about the formation of Venezuelan immigrant communities in Florida on the Cuban model; this 2012 article citing the figure of one million emigrants; and, two current articles, one from ABC-Univision and the other from the Miami Herald, reporting on the reactions of many of these emigrants to Chavez's death.

At the same time, though, Venezuela continues to host large immigrant populations. The World Bank's Migration and Remittances Factbook 2011 states that, in 2010, the stock of Venezuelan emigrants amounts to just over a half-million people while the stock of immigrants amounts to just over one million. In addition to the traditional immigrant populations from Colombia and southern Europe are smaller populations from elsewhere in the Caribbean basin and South America, with Syria ranking as a noteworthy source of immigrants. (Much of the current Cuban immigrant population is present in the country as a result of the close Cuban-Venezuelan alliance, which might be briefly summarized as an exchange of subsidized Venezuelan oil to Cuba in exchange for the supply of forty thousand Cuban professionals, mostly doctors, to Venezuela. This program, packaged as part of the Venezuelan government's "Bolivarian Missions" directed towards poor Venezuelans, has been fairly criticized on multiple grounds.) Venezuela, as Simon Romero described in a 2010 New York Times article, is a country that people leave and enter freely.

On this booming continent, oil-rich Venezuela is the exception: South America’s only shrinking economy this year. Officials are rationing hard currency. Government takeovers of private businesses are increasing. One prominent financial analyst recently had just two words of advice for investors here: “Run away.”

Many middle-class and wealthy Venezuelans have done exactly that, creating a slow-burning exodus of scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs and engineers. But wander into the bazaar in the shadow of Santa Teresa Basilica in this city’s old center, and the opposite seems to be happening as well.

Merchants murmur in Arabic, Urdu and Hindi. Haitians pushing ice cream carts chatter in Creole. Street vendors selling DVDs call out in Colombian-accented Spanish. Sip coffee in Naji Hammoud’s clothing shop, where photos of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley grace the walls, and the outlook is downright bullish.

“There’s money in the street, whether the price of oil is $8 a barrel or $80,” said Mr. Hammoud, 36, who came here from Lebanon a decade ago and has no plans to leave. “I could have moved to Europe, Germany, someplace, and done fine, but I would have been someone’s employee. Here, I’m my own boss.”

Venezuela is in the throes of an immigration puzzle. While large numbers of the middle class head for the exits, hundreds of thousands of foreign merchants and laborers have put down stakes here in recent years, complicating the portrait of how a brain drain unfolds.

[. . .]

At the other end of the economic spectrum, many new immigrants continue to arrive on tourist visas and overstay their visits, drawn by incomes that are still higher than those in some of Venezuela’s neighbors and by a broad array of social welfare programs for the poor championed by Mr. Chávez’s government.

“One can live with a little bit of dignity here, at least enough to send money home now and again,” said Etienne Dieu-Seul, 35, a Haitian street vendor, who moved here a month before the earthquake that devastated Haiti in January. After the disaster, officials here said they would grant residence visas to the 15,000 Haitians believed to have been here illegally.

As many as four million immigrants have come here from Colombia, according to Juan Carlos Tanus, director of the Association of Colombians in Venezuela. And some continue to arrive, despite the protracted recession here and the recent strides Colombia has made in growing its economy and fighting the rebel groups that have plagued it for so long.

“There’s work in Venezuela for those who want it,” said Arturo Vargas, 39, a Colombian laborer who moved to Caracas last year, finding jobs as a watchman and at a chicken-processing plant. “This place isn’t perfect, but it’s better than what I left behind.”

Indeed, one Reuters article claimed that between 2007 and 2011, the number of Spaniards emigrating to Venezuela rose by 114 percent, scarcely less that the increase of Spaniards migrating to Chile or Mexico!

In a links roundup post I made at my blog yesterday, I linked to four different articles making claims about Venezuela. One of the more interesting was Bhaskar Sunkara's article in the left-leaning In These Times, "Postmodern Perón", which placed Chavez squarely in the revived tradition of Latin American populism exemplified by Peronism in Argentina.

[T]he processes unfolding in Venezuela are complicated: The Bolivarian Revolution is both authoritarian and democratic, demagogic and participatory.

[. . .]

Following what Chávez says means taking a meander across the political spectrum. He summons Keynes with reverence, but he’s not a Keynesian. His style evokes Perón, but he’s not another Caudillo. He makes outbursts against materialism and globalization, but the ex-military officer would stick out on the G20 protest circuit. Chávez’s background is marked by a disconnect from the organized working class and the historic institutions of the Venezuelan Left. It’s fitting then that bits and pieces of everyone from Bolivar to Keynes to Che flow from his largely improvised communiqués.

Chavez's Venezuela has more than its faults, as Human Rights Watch noted yesterday. It, however, has never been as closed off from the world as Cuba under the Castros, even now. Cuba, as we've noted here at Demography Matters, has become a country that people are from, a country that's overwhelmingly a source of migrants and set to experience rapid aging in the context of general impoverishment. Venezuela hasn't reached that point, and may not be especially likely to; it's still a place that people go to as well as depart.

Cuba's missed opportunities

I'll start by linking to and quoting Rory Carroll's Guardian article "Cuba suffers exodus of the best and the brightest as economy remains in the doldrums".

Young people, especially well-educated professionals, are fleeing the island. Tens of thousands have emigrated in the past two years. The exodus has alarmed the communist government but remains largely unreported, a taboo topic for state media.

"It's a sign that the revolution has failed, so they don't want to talk about it. We are losing our future," said Ricardo Martinelli, a university professor who has seen many of his students and his only child, a 23-year-old technician, emigrate in recent months.

Analysts blame growing frustration over President Raúl Castro's stalled reforms. After formally succeeding his brother Fidel last year, he promised economic liberalisation, but the average monthly wage remains $20 (£14). "What I notice more and more is the disaffection of youth: more people not seeing a future," said one European diplomat. A government-organised free concert on the Malecón seafront attracted a small fraction of the expected audience. When performers attempted rabble-rousing speeches, the crowd drifted away.

Unlike the mass exodus of the Mariel boatlift in 1980, when a chaotic scramble across the Florida straits seized world attention, this new wave of emigration has involved an orderly – and discreet – transit through Havana's José Martí airport. "At least 80% of my peers have left," said José-Miguel Marín, a 38-year-old scientist. "I keep track through Facebook. They are all over: Ecuador, Mexico, the United States, Spain."

Bureaucratic and financial hurdles remain, but Cuba has loosened restrictions on leaving, opening the door to those who have the will and means to wrangle a visa for another country. Often that means the best and brightest. "I saw people weeping when they were turned down for a US visa," said Carmen Gonce, 65, after visiting the office that represents US interests in Havana.

Ecuador has become a magnet, because it requires only a letter of invitation rather than a visa. Last year Cuban arrivals soared by 147% to 27,114, according to the national immigration agency. The number of Cubans marrying Ecuadoreans jumped from 88 in 2007 to 1,542 in the first nine months of 2009.

The whole idea of an economic transition in Cuba from socialism on the models of China or Vietnam, with political authoritarianism combining with a substantial widening of economic freedom, remains far from realization.

Cuba was supposed to be enjoying a new dawn. On taking office Raúl Castro promised to open up a moribund economy 95% controlled by the state, raising hopes that a Caribbean North Korea would become a growth tiger like China or Vietnam.

There have been modest steps: greater autonomy for farmers; the ban on owning computers, mobile phones and DVD players has been lifted; de facto privatisation of barber shops and beauty salons; bureaucracy clipped in provincial towns. But Raúl has ignored deeper reforms, suggesting his more doctrinaire brother remains influential.

"As long as Fidel is alive, Raúl will not cross him," said Ann Louise Bardach, author of Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana, and Washington. "And for Fidel everything is about the fall of the Russians. He fears that if we open this, we lose everything."

Even now, recent reforms in the agricultural sector, distributing underused land to farmers, is being undermined by the high costs of mechanization and the lack of sufficient incentives to farmers--Cuba's not replicating China's successes in economic reform.

Many of Cuba's problems can be traced directly to its population issues. As J. Bradford Delong noted in 2008, Cuba on the eve of the revolution enjoyed levels of economic and human development comparable in Latin America only to developed Argentina and Uruguay, with higher standards of per capita income than most of southern Europe and one of the lowest rates of infant mortality in the world. The investments of the Castros' regime may have substantially increased levels of human development, but Cuba has lost tremendous amounts of ground economically. Once on par with Argentina and Uruguay, GDP per capita--at least according to the Penn World Table--on par with that of Mexico or the Dominican Republic. In the meantime, Cuba has adopted policies like the sharp limiting of urbanization that has doubtless played a major role in shifting labour in the Cuban economy from agriculture to higher value added sectors. One's tempted to conclude that Cuba's urbanization has been focused as much within Cuba (in Havana and smaller cities) as in the United States (in the Cuban-American heartland of Dade County), that for young Cubans moving to the big city means leaving their country.

Cuba is being very badly served by its rulers. The country has a narrow window, produced by its combination of sub-replacement fertility with continuing high levels of emigration. It has only a short amount of time in which it can grow rich, recovering at least some of the ground that it has lost over the past half-century. Instead, the current government has opted for policies of stagnation--economic, political, social--which will serve the country badly, perhaps allowing emigration as an escape valve for the unhappy young. This 2002 Library of Congress report makes it clear that Cuba's future economic development depends on a more economically rational distribution of its population, in economic sectors and by geography. Nearly a decade later, that hasn't happened.

Cuba may yet become a democracy, eventually, but I'm now much less hopeful than I was in my postings of 2006 and 2009 that Cuba will reform before it becomes a sort of Caribbean Moldova, impoverished and depopulating. Governments can adopt many different policies to deal with their demographic issues, but Cuba's government certainly isn't notable for its competency. Yes, replacement migration might be an option, but where would the migrants come from? and why would they head to Cuba, instead of the United States or Spain or any number of more attractive destinations? The possibility of self-reinforcing migration, as young Cubans leave a Cuba that would be left increasingly behind by other countries with better economic records and considerable need for labour and more follow suit as Cuba's position deteriorates, is a real one.

More on Cuban population futures

Cuba's population aging, which I blogged about back in August 2006, is starting to gain more press attention.

This country reached a tipping point in 2006. It wasn’t any one event in particular, but according to Cuba’s Office of National Statistics, the island’s population of 11.2 million stopped growing that year, and dipped slightly. And it has been falling ever since.

Cuba’s population is projected to decrease by 100,000 by 2025, and the arithmetic behind that decline is a simple matter of subtraction: More and more Cubans are leaving the island, and Cuban mothers are having fewer children. The country’s fertility rate of 1.4 children per woman ranks as the lowest in Latin America.

The statistics highlight a risky demographic experiment that has been developing here for years.

While Cuba’s socialist health care system takes good care of the elderly and has prolonged life expectancy rates, the island’s lousy economy--squeezed by U.S. trade sanctions and its own inefficiencies--is driving young people to emigrate, while limiting family size.

As a result, senior citizens will be one of the fast-growing sectors of Cuba’s population in the coming decades. Life expectancy in Cuba is now 75 years for men and 79 for women, roughly on par with the United States, where those figures are 75 and 80, respectively, according to United Nations statistics. By 2025, according a recent article on the topic in Cuba’s communist newspaper Granma, 26 percent of Cubans will be 60 or older--the highest percentage of seniors in Latin America.

The article goes on to note that, with strained pension and other welfare systems, the standard of living for Cuban seniors may be quite low. Moreover, as the article notes, Cuba's aging isn't helped by emigration; the abstract "Cuban International Migration and Low Fertility Conditions ..." makes the point that Cuba's natural increase is diminished substantially by emigration. This will alter Cuba's standing in the Caribbean: A G. Edward Ebanks notes in his paper, continued high population growth in the Dominican Republic can expected to make that country the largest Hispanophone country in the Caribbean by the mid-21st century, while--he does not say, but this can be inferred--the Dominican Republic's lack of controls on internal migration allows for more fluid population distributions more suitable for an effective capitalist economy.

The UNFPA paper Social policies, family arrangements and population ageing in Cuba, by Rolando García Quiñones, goes into substantial detail. The findings are relatively predictable: Urban and developed areas are relatively older than rural and underdeveloped areas, the size of the average family has declined even as younger people find it necessary to stay in the family home on account of housing issues, and so on. The raising of the retirement age is something that receives extended treatment.

Until 2008, retirement age was 55 years for women and 60 for men. A new Law on Social and Security Assistance, approved by the end of last year by Parliament, came into effect on January 2009. Among other aspects, the new law modifies retirement age, increasing it by 5 years. But this increase will be gradual.

From 2009 onwards, retirement age will be raised six months each year, up to the year 2018, when it would be established at 60 years for women and 65 for men. Its application during the next ten years defers the retirement of more than 285 thousand people, with a saving of 4.5 billion pesos to the Social Security coffers. In the mean time it has been decided to increase the retirement benefits and to establish other benefits.

Of course, things can and will be complicated by migration. I've blogged about the division between Cubas A and B, a relatively developed west and a relatively underdeveloped east that traditionally produces migrants. Let's not forget the United States, home to a Cuban-American community with members numbering more than a tenth of the population of Cuba itself and concentrated in a south Florida that's the nearest point of American land to Cuba itself, providing beside numerous human links to sustain chain migration.

These migrations, on top of the general population aging, will certainly have a major impact on Cuba's long-term prospects. Replacement migration is a possibility, I suppose, but where from? Cuba's high human development doesn't correspond to the sort of high economic development that attracts migrants. It may well be that even with a best-case post-Castro transition, Cuba's economic prospects may be hamstrung by an excess of seniors and an insufficiency of workers. What the consequences of this would be for Cuban stability I leave to others to imagine.

Cuba's past and future populations

For most of its post-Columbian history, Cuba has had a relatively small population, numbering barely more than a quarter-million people by 1792 and only reaching the total of one million people in the 1840s. During the first three centuries of Spanish rule, Cuba was neglected in preference to the much richer mainland; in the final century of Spanish rule, a Cuba that was now one of Spain's major colonies prospered thanks to an open economy dominated by its sugar plantations. Cuba's white population was bolstered first by the immigration of French refugees from the future Haiti then by substantial immigration from metropolitan Spain, complementing a very large Afro-Cuban population and the substantial Chinese Cuban community created, like the other Asian immigrant communities in the 19th century Caribbean, to replace the labour that enslaved Africans were once forced to provide.

The incessant wars of independence in the late 19th century slowed Cuba's growth somewhat. After Cuba became independent, the 1899 census recorded a total population of 1.57 million people, 89% of whom were born in Cuba. This Cuba was still at a very early

Abel F. Losada Alvarez' 2000 paper "Demographic change and economic growth in Cuba (1898-1958)" (PDF format) provides an excellent outline of the first six decades of independent Cuba's demographic history.

Let us bear in mind that most works on economic growth in developing countries locate the development threshold, demographically speaking, at a life expectancy between 50 and 55 years of age and a net reproduction rate between 2.0 and 1.75. In 1953, Cuba was already on its way to the so-called "modern population growth", with a life expectancy slightly over 60 for both sexes and a NRR of around 1.75.

In the 1950-1955 period, Cuba was clearly outside the "Strategic Growth Territory" of Latin America at that point, in an intermediate position between the Western European "territory" of the thirties and that of the whole of Latin America around 1985-90. These stages of demographic development have been conformed by the confluence of modernization factors and elements which have conditioned the rhythm and variety of this modernization.

Alvarez suggests that Cuba's population was helped along in its "demographic modernization" by the immigration of more than a million people in the three decades after independence, including 735 thousand immigrants from Spain. These Spanish immigrants, mostly from the regions of Galicia and Asturias in the northwest of Spain and from the insular Canary Islands, had already adopted for themselves many of the contraceptive and other behaviours typical of populations advanced on the demographic transition and communicated them to Cubans. Other factors--the growth of a culture of mass media and mass consumption aided by the nearness of the United States, Cuba's increasing urbanization, and a rapidly rising standard of living--played their standard role. By the time of the Cuban Revolution, despite continued high rates of net immigration from Spain and the Caribbean as well as a high birth rate, Cuba's population was starting to stabilize.

Cuba's Communization changed these trends substantially. After a brief post-revolutionary baby boom, Cuba went through an accelerated transition, TFRs dropping below replacement levels in 1978. At the same time, Cuba abruptly became a country of mass emigration; to date, more than a million Cubans have emigrated in successive waves, most to the United States where these have formed a famously coherent Cuban-American community in exile. Cuba's population growth has continued throughout the forty-seven years of Castro's rule and is still relatively young by the standards of First World countries, but with sustained sub-replacement fertility rates and continued high rates of emigration it is fast tapering off.

How is the Cuban population likely to evolve in the coming years? Sergio Díaz-Briquets' "Cuba's future Economic Crisis: The Ageing Population and the Social Safety Net" paints an alarming picture. As a result of Cuba's particular demographic trends, Cuba's "median age has risen from 23.4 years in 1960 to 32.9 in 2000; it is projected to increase to 43.1 by 2025, rising even further by 2050, the end of the projection period." This rapid aging will have serious effects on the Cuban work force.

In 2002, when the country had 1.6 million elderly, the [Potential Support Ratio] in Cuba was 7, a relatively favorable ratio. By 2050, as the number of elderly is projected to reach 3.7 million, with a relatively unchanged overall population size, the PSR is expected to decline to 2 potential workers per retiree.

By comparison, in 2050 the Dominican Republic is expected to have a PSR of 4 and Chile and the United States PSRs of 3. The problem of underfunded retirement and pension systems that bedevils First World countries will be catastrophic for Cuba, in Díaz-Briquets' words possibly "imperil[ling] the country’s economic development since financing pension and health care programs will consume a disproportionate share of national resources. Paying for elderly services will be a major drag on the economy, placing a heavy tax burden on individuals and businesses. The tax burden may even be so onerous as to make Cuba less than attractive as an international investment destination."

Cuba's substantial economic underperformance, taking Cuba from a position alongside the richest countries of Latin America and southern Europe to one closer to the poorer countries of the Caribbean and Central America, thus might never be remedied. Indeed, it almost certainly will worsen Cuba's population prospects. Leaving aside the obvious economic incentives for potential emigrants from Cuba, Luis Locay argues in his papers "Schooling vs. Human Capital: How Prepared is Cuba's Labor Force to Function in a Market Economy?" (PDF format) and "The Future of Cuba's Labor Market: Prospects and Recommendations" (PDF format) that Cuba's well-educated labor force is inefficiently deployed, with the professional sectors of the Cuban economy having far too many workers for their own good. Locay concludes in his second paper that "[t]he current occupational and skill distributions of Cuba’s labor force are probably quite different from what they will be in a future market-oriented economy. Considerable retooling will be necessary. This not only will be costly, but also means that Cuba’s relatively high levels of education and large stock of professional talent overstate the earning capacity of the island’s labor force." A population with basic expectations that aren't likely to be met in its country is certain to produce a good number of emigrants.

Students of Cuba's likely post-Castro transition have looked around the world for likely models. People interested in Cuba's population prospects might be best served by looking at the example of Bulgaria, where the country's population has fallen through the emigration of something like one million Bulgarians--a ninth of the 1990 population--between 1990 and 2005. Presently standing at 7.7 million, Bulgaria's population is commonly projected to fall by another third to 4.8 million by 2050, thanks to lowest-low fertility and massive emigration. Bulgaria is by some measures three times as wealthy as Cuba, though; disparities between the living standards of Bulgaria and Greece are much smaller than those prevailing between Cuba on the one hand and the United States or Spain on the other. Moldova's experience might be worth keeping in mind.

Most of the estimates made of Cuba's future population expect the island nation's population to remain more or less stable until 2050 at around 11 million people. It's safe to say that these estimates are almost certainly overcounts. For the time being, I feel comfortable in predicting that after Castro, the Cuban diaspora will grow very strongly indeed.