Cubans Between Memory and Forgetting
Photo Feature by Fabiana del Valle
HAVANA TIMES – He slowly opens his eyes. More than a routine, waking up each morning has become a challenge. He tries to recognize the room he’s waking up in, but he can’t, he only senses the echo of a life that is fading from his mind. He is surrounded by faces he can no longer identify, a family that has become unfamiliar in recent times. This is how the days begin for a 91-year-old man.
His life is marked by the routine of forgetting and the fragility of the body. The walls become allies, like crutches he never lets go of as he moves through the house. Frustration overwhelms him: his hands tremble, his sight no longer serves him, and his steps drag like shadows from the past.
Every gesture he makes carries a story behind it, a story often lost in the cracks of a system that doesn’t provide the care these men and women deserve. Old age in Cuba is lived in a context where tired memory and body face an unforgiving economic and social reality.
In 2023, according to data from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), over 22% of the Cuban population was over 60 years old, making Cuba one of the most aged countries in Latin America.
Many parents, grandparents, neighbors, retired professionals, and workers live today in households with meager resources. The burden of care falls entirely on the family, which also faces its own battles: insufficient salaries, limited access to medicine, inflation that robs even the soul, and uncertainty that has become daily bread.
Retirement pensions are symbolic when compared to the high cost of living. Most retired elderly people survive on figures that barely reach 1500 CUP per month—roughly 5 USD at the informal exchange rate. To make it clearer, this is a country where a liter of cooking oil can cost between 900 and 1500 pesos, where inflation is speeding out of control with no brakes.
Not long ago, I saw an old man in front of a kiosk selling individual pizzas, sodas, and sweets. He pulled some bills from the pocket of his shirt and counted them again and again, as if counting could make them grow in number. He asked the clerk about prices, murmured something to himself, and put the money away. He left without buying anything, resigned and hopeless.
For many in this country, daily life is a battle for survival—not only physical and emotional, but economic. It’s true that some receive help from abroad, but those who aren’t so lucky depend on the goodwill of their loved ones or the State’s pitiful social protection.
Sons and grandsons become caregivers, often navigating between love and exhaustion, tenderness and the anger of not being able to offer more—of the helplessness that comes with living on an island where it doesn’t matter how hard you try if the result is always the same.
Our elders supported this country with their work, sacrifice, and faith in the future. Their situation calls for institutional solutions, social sensitivity, civic awareness, and commitment.
They deserve more than symbolic pensions, insufficient medicine, or improvised homes—they deserve respect, presence and companionship. In the end, we will all reach that day, waking each morning in an unfamiliar bed, searching the walls for the balance that life has slowly taken away.
