Poverty Reaches Much of the Population in Cuba
HAVANA TIMES – Sitting with her feet on the sidewalk, in the doorway of a neighbor’s house, 80-year-old Teodosia Nilda Hernandez sells a pair of shoes to make it to the end of the month, a very common practice in the Dragones neighborhood, in the municipality of Centro Habana, one of the 15 that make up Cuba’s capital.
“The situation is bad. And my pension isn’t enough. The pharmacy (that sells subsidized products) has nothing, so I have to sell things in order to buy overpriced medicine on the street. Six hundred pesos (about $1.40 at the informal market rate, the most widely used) for ten enalapril tablets,” she told IPS.
Retired for 30 years after an accident at her former job in the Provincial Housing Directorate, she used to receive the equivalent of $3.60 a month—the minimum amount of social assistance at that time—until August, when the government doubled that figure through a measure that increased the income of assistance recipients who were receiving less than $9.40 per month.
That increase benefited almost 1.6 million people in Cuba, but it does not represent a substantial improvement, considering that one kilogram of rice, the staple of the Cuban diet, costs $1.40, while the monthly ration of three kilograms per person—sold by the state at subsidized prices—has been delayed for more than two months.
That’s why Hernández, who has no family to support her apart from a sister in a similar situation, sells a pair of shoes for $7 and, from time to time, “whatever else comes along.”
In Cuba, remittances from abroad are an important lifeline for many families, and poverty especially punishes those who do not receive them, as well as elderly people without family support—a growing phenomenon in a country where one-quarter of its 9.7 million inhabitants are aged 60 or older.
On Campanario Street, where Hernandez lives on the third floor of a building, the same scene repeats itself along the sidewalks.
The owner of the house where Hernandez sits, a 64-year-old widow living on a pension, is selling a wheelchair.
“You get by however you can. Maybe if you buy rice, you can’t buy meat. We have needs. Sometimes I don’t have anything to eat, but I don’t want to speak badly of my country,” she told IPS, asking to remain anonymous.
A couple of blocks away, another woman, also requesting anonymity, works independently from Tuesday to Sunday selling hardware products at a market stall; in her downtime, she sits at her doorway selling LED bulbs.
“With a basic salary, it’s not enough—you have to supplement it by selling little things, more or less to be able to survive this difficult situation,” she told IPS.
According to Cuban economist Omar Everleny Perez, based on maximum prices published by the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), two people in Cuba need to spend 24,351 pesos per month (about $60) to cover basic food needs.
Perrez also estimates the cost of living at about $113 per month for two people, which includes, in addition to the basic food basket, the most basic demands of transportation, clothing, hygiene, and communications.
This calculation does not, due to variability, include expenses such as medicine, housing or appliance maintenance, leisure, or electricity and gas consumption.
Other economists estimate even higher figures, but all are far above the $15.60 represented by the average monthly salary on this Caribbean island nation.
Measuring Poverty
“The importance of measuring poverty is that it allows you to see the magnitude of the problem, and it gives policymakers an idea of how many resources would be needed to address it. It’s essential data. For years, it hasn’t been public,” analyzed sociologist Mayra Espina, a specialist on poverty and inequality, in a July interview on the podcast La Sobremesa.
Espina explained that since the 2000s, Cuba has not measured poverty based on income, opting instead for mechanisms such as the Human Development Index (HDI) to measure vulnerability. The HDI incorporates three dimensions: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living.
According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Cuba’s HDI reached 0.762 in 2023—the latest year reported—placing the country in the category of high human development.
However, Cuba’s HDI is below the Latin American and Caribbean average (0.783) and has shown a declining trend since 2010—unlike the region as a whole—with a sharp drop beginning in 2020, due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Espina argues that in more recent years, as state social benefits have diminished in the face of the economic crisis, it would be more appropriate to measure poverty based on income in relation to the cost of living.
Incomes That Don’t Add Up
In a later interview with IPS on the last day of September, Espina said that based on her own research, she estimates that between 40% and 45% of the Cuban population is in poverty, meaning their personal and family incomes are not enough to cover essential needs.
“The calculation refers to those who don’t reach 20,000 pesos per month ($47) per capita in 2025, considering basic food needs and a small additional expense for other products or services,” she explained, based on Perez’s cost-of-living estimates.
To arrive at her estimates, Espina used employment surveys, statistical data on average incomes in the state and private sectors, average pensions, remittance reception, rent costs, field research with small samples of people in disadvantaged and high-income groups, among other methods.
“I’ve tried to approximate the amounts of all possible economic sources for the different social groups,” she summarized.
Other research shows even more alarming results.
An annual report on this issue, conducted since 2019 with fieldwork carried out by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH), found that 89% of Cuban families live in extreme poverty, based on interviews with 1,344 people between June and July 2025.
The study identifies extreme poverty when per capita income is below US $1.90 a day, according to an international standard established by the World Bank in 2015, using Cuba’s informal currency exchange rate.
However, the Cuban government dismisses any statistics provided by the OCDH, since it receives funding from the US government—a country with antagonistic relations that maintains sanctions and other measures against the island to subvert its institutional order.
According to USAspending, the official US open data source on federal spending, the OCDH received $2.2 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) between October 2019 and September 2025.
Inequalities on the Rise
“The 1990s can be considered a precedent for the current situation. That’s when this process of social heterogenization and re-stratification was set,” Espina told IPS.
Basically, the economic crisis of the 1990s following the collapse of the socialist bloc Cuba was part of, and the reforms to manage it, brought about “the re-emergence of social classes almost extinguished in the Cuban socialist project, like the urban petty bourgeoisie,” the sociologist said.
“Inequalities grew, as some jobs paid better than others—tourism, joint ventures (with Cuban and foreign capital)… and it was also a time of increased poverty,” she added.
According to Espina, poverty measurements in the 1980s placed nearly 7% of the population in that condition. In the 1990s, urban poverty—rural poverty was never measured—was estimated at about 14.7%. The last measurement, in the early 2000s, put urban poverty at 20%.
The widening gap between the purchasing power of the lower and upper classes deepened with other economic reforms that opened up the private sector, such as in 2010, when private businesses were allowed, or in 2021, with the emergence of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs).
Since 2019, in line with the worsening economic crisis, the country has begun implementing social inclusion policies to mitigate vulnerabilities among the population, replacing its previous system of social benefits marked by a “homogenizing, egalitarian universalism,” as Espina describes it.
The earlier system of social support had “many blind spots, because when the same services are available to everyone, they can be better utilized by those who start from a more advantageous position, while disadvantaged and vulnerable groups tend to benefit less,” she said.
However, Cuba’s financial and material constraints remain a barrier to these new social inclusion policies having a significant impact on those living in poverty.
“I have a lot of confidence that [on paper] these are good policies, but much dissatisfaction with the level of implementation achieved,” Espina concluded.
First published in Spanish by IPS and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.