“There Are No Beggars in Cuba,” says Labor Minister
By Marleidy Muñoz and Raul Medina Orama (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – Marta Elena Feito Cabrera, head of Cuba’s Ministry of Labor and Social Security, stated on July 14, 2025, during a session of the National Assembly, that “there are no beggars” in the country. According to her, begging and precarious or street work are either made-up phenomena or a “lazy way of life” adopted by some people to avoid formal employment or paying taxes. However, these absolute statements contradict not only the country’s official statistics but also the visible reality on the island’s streets and statements from other senior government officials.
During a presentation in the National Assembly the official declared: “These people are disguised as beggars. They’re not beggars. There are no beggars in Cuba. They’ve found an easy way to make money without working (…) under proper formalities. There’s also talk of ‘divers’ (…) Those people rummaging through garbage bins, throwing trash on the ground, digging through waste, looking for cans, some say they’re looking for food, that’s also not true. (…) Those people are collecting raw materials and are illegal self-employed workers. What they’re doing is tax evasion.”
Feito’s statements are misleading and contradict others made by her own ministry in June 2024 during a Council of Ministers meeting, where it was acknowledged that more than 3,700 “patients” are housed in “Social Protection Centers” due to their alleged “wandering behavior.” This official euphemism, which includes begging, is used to describe individuals with “a way of life characterized by instability and insecurity of residence, lack of self-care, and no economic autonomy.”
The actual numbers may be even higher, but independent experts cannot verify them.
Begging is a known and acknowledged reality by the Cuban government, despite official propaganda. Several public statements demonstrate this.
In April 2025, during an official visit to Granma Province, President Miguel Diaz-Canel admitted the existence of beggars and called for preventing an increase: “We cannot allow that, during this stage of economic crisis, this proliferates — the destitute, the beggars, panhandlers, child labor, and harassment of tourists.”
Also, in March this year, an article in the Communist Party’s Granma newspaper headlined “Begging is Not Compatible with the Cuban Social Project” introduced a piece by Isabel Acosta Sanchez, a magistrate of the Supreme Court, which included a veiled threat against those involved in such acts.
The article was a version of an earlier one published on the Supreme Court’s official website, where Acosta acknowledged: “Begging is a social phenomenon linked to issues such as inequality and poverty, and it represents a challenge for the State, families, and society in general.”
The high-ranking judicial official also stated that “in Cuba, complex economic conditions (…) have a greater impact on some segments of the population, at times placing them in vulnerable situations, which unscrupulous individuals take advantage of to lead them into begging (…)”
The republication of this article in the country’s highest-circulation newspaper caused controversy and backlash. Cuban professor, essayist, and historian Alina Barbara Lopez wrote on social media: “The ruling elite is bothered by the ‘bad publicity’ created by beggars and hungry people swarming our streets. Yet they are the main culprits of this situation. They designed the disaster. At least have the courage to acknowledge it.”
Experts and the Public Refute the Minister of Labor and Social Security’s Claim
Sociologist Elaine Acosta Gonzalez, Ph.D. in International and Intercultural Studies and research associate at Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute, told El Toque in response to the minister’s remarks: “Continuing to ignore, downplay, or cover up the growing impoverishment of the population makes the Cuban government doubly responsible for the current deterioration in quality of life and the increase in homelessness. [They are] responsible for causing it and also for hiding it and not seeking possible solutions.”
Acosta, who also heads the Observatory on Aging, Care and Rights Cuido60, has no doubt about “the increase in people living on the street or relying on public generosity for basic survival. Official figures acknowledged — after a decade without data — that the number of homeless people has more than doubled.”
Several experts have warned that the rise in poverty and begging on the island reflects the ongoing economic crisis, exacerbated by limited access to basic resources.
References to “people with wandering behavior” by other Cuban officials and in various state media reports contrast sharply with Feito’s claim that there are no beggars in Cuba. This official recognition also confirms that Cuban authorities are aware of the existence of people who, for various economic and social reasons, lack access to basic resources and resort to precarious means of survival, including panhandling or scavenging.
Numerous images shared on social media by citizens and recent reports by non-state-controlled press outlets also show a growing presence of beggars on the island.
Activist Maria Lopez, a resident of the Centro Habana municipality, told Radio Martí: “It’s a very harsh situation in every case, but when you see young people asking for food on the streets, the gravity of the problem becomes more evident. The situation has gotten so bad that on every corner, you can see seven or eight of them.”
Another Havana resident, Dunia Medina, told Radio Martí: “Begging has increased due to inflation. It’s incomprehensible that after working over 40 years, many people have to live in such miserable conditions (…). And it’s not just adults — there are also children. On busy streets like Monte in Old Havana or Galiano, you see large numbers of beggars every day, including many elderly people.”
Commenting on Labor Minister Feito’s recent remarks in Parliament, sociologist Elaine Acosta added in her statements to El Toque: “Most people collecting cans to sell (many of them over 60 years old) cannot meet their basic needs with the meager pensions they receive. We’re talking about survival activities, so criminalizing them by labeling them as tax evaders or immoral is a failure to understand the basic needs not being met by the State or any other institution in Cuba.”
Many retirees in Cuba receive the equivalent of less than $5 USD per month as their monthly pension.
According to Acosta, “With these repeated statements, the Cuban government continues to criminalize poverty instead of seeking alternatives to offset the impacts of all the austerity policies it has implemented.”
On the topic of begging, Acosta previously told Martí Verifica: “In the Cuban case, the complex structural and systemic crisis largely explains the rise in homelessness, due — among other reasons — to the declining role of the State in social protection.”
A 2024 study by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH), conducted across all provinces, revealed that extreme poverty affects at least 89% of the surveyed population.
“In Cuba, not only are civil and political rights violated, but also — among others — social rights. That’s why we always say that the Cuban regime not only represses, it also impoverishes,” said attorney Yaxys Cires, the Cuban Human Rights Observatory Director of Strategy.
Following the minister’s recent comments, the NGO condemned “the criminalization of people without resources” and criticized the authorities for “asking citizens to ‘fight and report’ beggars via a hotline, in addition to deporting people from eastern provinces out of Havana after ‘profiling’ them.”
Economist Pedro Monreal has clarified: “In Cuba, poverty and vulnerability (…) are not misfortunes due to age, illness, or family circumstances, but the result of a completely dysfunctional labor market and pension system.”
Nearly half of Cuban retirees are in “vulnerable situations,” with monthly incomes at or below the minimum of 1,528 CUP ($4 USD), according to official data.
Monreal has also stated on social media, regarding the official narrative: “The issue is not claiming that begging is ‘incompatible’ with something they call the ‘Cuban social project,’ but rather the failure to recognize its internal causes or institutional failure in addressing it (…)”
According to the economist, “Begging is a specific outcome of the ‘normalization’ of mass impoverishment driven by the 2021 ‘ordenamiento’ reforms, and the solution should not involve a reductionist, punitive legal approach to aspects of begging.”
Regarding Feito’s recent denial of the existence of beggars in the country, Monreal called her remarks “reactionary” and responded on social media: “It seems the ‘minister’ doesn’t care about the poor — only that they be invisible. She labels them drunks, fakers, and illegal. Madam, the fight is against poverty, not the poor. Stop this nonsense and propose decent wages and pensions.”
According to a study by the 4Métrica foundation, “For decades, the Cuban State has boasted internationally that social rights are fully realized in Cuba. However, the country’s reality is quite different: the vast majority of Cubans live in extreme poverty — a situation evidenced by the dilapidated state of most homes and their low purchasing power, the severe and prolonged food crisis, the deterioration of the healthcare system, the housing problem, and poor public services like electricity, water, and transportation, among other concrete factors.”
Experts agree that begging is not a matter of individual morality but the direct result of a collapsed economic system. The lack of decent employment, the breakdown of public services, and the absence of social protections that have driven many people to survive in extreme conditions. However, this remains a recurring subject of misinformation by Cuban authorities.
First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.
“Beggars.” Who exactly are these beggars? And another question is why are there beggars on the streets? Whether one lives in Cuba, San Francisco, as Moses points out, or in Canada, beggars everywhere these days are populating our streets.
Anyone analyzing the beggar crisis in Cuba, and today it is a crisis there when President Miguel Diaz-Canel abruptly fires his Labor Minister for her attempt to deny the obvious and glaring crisis. With the Cuban economy in a precipitous free fall spiralling toward the abyss, Cubans suffering daily blackouts, shortages of all sustenance surviving basics – food , medicines, fuels – Cubans are at their wits end simply trying to survive from one day to the next. Daily depression, anxiety, constant worry, begins to take its toll outwardly manifesting itself in negative outcomes.
One will do what one must simply to try and survive.
What is the result of this human tragedy in Cuba but mental breakdown. Any psychologist will tell you when all avenues for survival are being seriously threatened drastic action manifests itself on the streets – like begging for help. In totalitarian Cuba, a beggar cannot simply walk down the street and rightfully denigrate the unresponsive totalitarian government because such vocal opposition and rightful outrage will land one in jail.
So how does a Cuban literally survive if the right to object to the current economic disaster cannot be overtly manifested on the streets? Quietly, without pretensions, stand, or sit, or walk on a Cuban street hand outstretched or cap in hand waiting for a saviour Samaritan to take pity and donate a few pesos.
Many of these desperate Cuban beggars are aged. Having contributed a better part of their lives working and paying their taxes to the Cuban economy they are now “rewarded“ for their thirty or forty years of labor contribution with a pittance, paltry, unliveable pension – the equivalent of $5.00 American dollars per month. The Cuban pensioner, along with the majority of Cubans, faces a hopeless economic reality. Moreover, the Cuban totalitarian government also is a hopeless cause.
Either the Cuban pensioner goes out and continues to sacrifice his/her body to earn a few extra pesos to survive, or the aged pensioner buries their pride and takes up begging to simply eat. It is that stark. In Cuba today nobody can meet their basic daily survival needs on the pittance pension provided by the bankrupt totalitarian government – absolutely no-one.
So, yes, in Cuba out of absolutely necessity in a total economically hopeless environment there are beggars; however, through no fault of their own.
However, in wealthy Canada, which obviously cannot be compared to Cuba, there is economic hope. Hope is the key differentiating factor between Canada and Cuba. In wealthy Canada there are a plethora of social agencies, government programs that help these “beggars” to get off the streets and contribute positively to society. The majority of these people are not retired workers short on money, but youth. Young people perhaps trapped in cycle of illicit drugs precipitating psychological problems, without work, perhaps abandoned by their parents live on the streets or tent encampments.
So, in the end, as I see it, the beggars on the streets of Cuba are there from sheer outright hopelessness in the bankrupt Cuban economy. In wealthy Canada, the beggars on the streets have hope – an abundance of hope – for positive change from a plethora of helpful social and government agencies.
Breaking News: the Cuban Labor Minister that made this stupid comment, Marta Elena Feito Cabrera, has resigned. On the issue of poverty and homelessness, the United States holds no moral high ground. Worse yet, even as one of the world’s most successful economies, street beggars are increasing. Here in San Francisco, the street begging is far worse than what is going on in Havana. That said, there are lessons to be learned from San Francisco. Increasing wages is not the only answer. We have one of the highest wage scales in the world here in San Francisco. Access to public services including restrooms also helps but isn’t the solution either. Food centers and homeless shelters are packed every day. Again, not the solution. So what works? I wish I knew. But the lesson Havana can take from San Francisco is that it will only get worse if nothing is done. Based on the former Labor Minister’s comments, that seems to be the current strategy.
Beggars. Hmmm. I’ve spent 8 weeks in Cuba over the last few years. The term ‘beggars’ is a bit misleading. Walk downtown in any Canadian city and you will come across many ‘beggars.’
Seldom, have I come across anyone begging in Cuba. That doesn’t mean that the scams aren’t prevalent and sometimes aggressive.
The correlation between mental health and begging is the same everywhere.
This doesn’t discount however the political nonsense that’s become of Cuba. The government is a facade. The Cuban elite do not live the same way as the general populace.
Ugh. Too many rabbit holes here.
Love Cuba, love the people and respect one and other.
What a cynical comment of this so called minister. My impression as a tourist is that all Cubans are basically beggers. I got asked for money everywhere. Even by police during a traffic control of my rental car where they came up with some dubious reason of allegedly missing documents. After paying some dollars all was fine suddenly.
What a joke of a system.
Where is this so called victory? Hasta la Victoria siempre??
I did not see a bit of victory anywhere in Cuba…