When Sagrado Armando Garcia, an 85-year-old former civil servant, collapsed in his home, his son couldn't take him to the hospital because he didn't have gas for the family car, he said. There have been times recently when Garcia has been so hungry and dizzy that he's thought he might collapse again.
Garcia spent decades working in Cuba's Ministry of Social Security, believing in a system that promised to protect people in their old age. That sense of security has vanished.
"They are abandoning us to our fate," he said.
For years, Cuba, under the burden of harsh US economic sanctions, has struggled to fulfill Fidel Castro's promise that his communist government would provide basic services for workers: subsidized food, healthcare, education, public transportation and pensions, Reuters writes.
Now the country's elderly citizens - long accustomed to failing public services, power outages and chronic shortages of food and medicine - are facing even more difficult conditions after the Donald Trump administration cut off the island's fuel supply in late January.
A State Department spokesman referred Reuters to recent testimony by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who blamed internal corruption and mismanagement for Cuba's problems, not U.S. sanctions.
“Cuba had power outages long before January 3 of this year, for two reasons: they were no longer receiving free oil from Venezuela and they had not invested a single dollar in renovating their power plants,” the spokesman said, referring to Rubio. “Cuba is in chaos.”
Reuters writes that pensions have been reduced to the equivalent of seven dollars a month at the black market rate, as the peso has lost about a third of its value against the dollar since the blockade began.
The Cuban government has requested assistance from the United Nations World Food Program so that it can continue to provide two meals a day to the vulnerable and elderly.
Cuba is the fastest-aging country in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than a quarter of the population is over 60, according to the Cuban state statistics agency, the result of a sharp drop in the birth rate and a mass exodus of young people. The population has shrunk to less than 10 million as of 2021, a drop of 10 percent, according to Reuters.
Etienne Laband, a representative of the World Food Program in Havana, said that the combination of high prices and decreasing pensions and rations has put many elderly people in a dangerous situation, in which they cannot afford enough food or medical care.
“This is a very high-risk population now, and the situation has worsened since January,” he told Reuters. “Inflation has skyrocketed, there is no public transport, and it costs a lot of money to get around.”
Cuba's public health system, long considered a great achievement of the communist regime, is collapsing under the burden of years of sanctions.
The number of doctors in Cuba decreased by 30 percent between 2019 and 2024, according to Cuban government data - for the most recent year for which data is publicly available - while 70 percent of essential medicines were either difficult to access or completely unavailable.
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According to the Cuban Health Ministry, the waiting list for surgeries is expected to reach 160.000 patients by the end of the year, an increase of 60 percent. Most medications, including those for blood pressure, are in short supply, doctors told Reuters.
On an island where the average monthly salary is around $15, even small sums of money sent by relatives abroad mean a lot.
For older Cubans who do not receive remittances from abroad, conditions are particularly difficult.
“In this crisis that Cuba has been going through since January, the elderly are the ones who are most affected,” said Brian Arbueles, a priest at the San Juan de Letran church in Havana. “These are people who have worked for decades, but whose pensions are now not enough to live on.”
He added: “The situation is terrible.”
Regina Zaida Jorge (74), a retired doctor who lives alone in the former servants' quarters of a once luxurious old house, does not receive money from outside Cuba.
There is no running water in her small apartment, so she is forced to carry it every day from a cistern on the roof. She says she survives on government rations and food parcels distributed by the Catholic Church.
“The policies here are designed to guarantee the basics,” she said. “But essentially, they are cosmetic measures, to keep you alive. You have to forget about wanting to have a TV, a phone, the pension is not enough for anything.”
She said that as a low-paid civil servant, she gave “everything” to a system that was unable to provide her with even basic necessities like soap. Now, as a pensioner barely managing to survive, she says: “I feel like I sacrificed for nothing.”
US sanctions last year led leading money transfer company Western Union to suspend services to Cuba.
Some, however, still manage to find a way to get money from abroad.
Sonja Belmonte Puebla (73), receives small amounts in dollars from her daughter in Florida.
Unlike many of her generation, she said she is enjoying her old age, living independently at home with her husband and with little need for government assistance. "I can sometimes treat myself and eat well," Belmonte said.
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