Caught Between the First and Third World, Who Will Support Cuba's Elderly?

Exclusive to Huffington Post.

In my Yugoslav-model building, with a hundred and forty-four apartments, there are not many young people. Over twenty years ago a group of improvised builders erected the columns and walls to hold their families. It was an era when the Soviet subsidy allowed us to glimpse a bright future, one that called for the creation of a "New Man." The baby-boom of the seventies had filled the schools with children who were expected to inhabit the society prophesied in the manuals of Marxism.

When the crisis of the nineties came, Cuban women carefully calculated their fertile days, so as not to bring the crisis into the small spaces they shared with parents and grandparents. Abortion was the most common contraceptive method for couples with no roof of their own. The birth rate fell to levels only exhibited in the first world, while the rate of emigration competed with the poorest places on the planet. Caught between these conflicting trends, the Cuban population aged while the young sought other horizons.

Now the alarm has reached the highest spheres of power and a new law is being discussed that would postpone the age of retirement. In the absence of young arms to bear the social costs, the elderly themselves will have to pay. In response, hospitals now ban abortion except to save the life of the mother. The national press, however, hasn't reported the loss of this right, which would set off feminine protests in other countries. Meanwhile, many wombs remain vacant, while couples wait for a roof of their own, a living wage, or a visa to allow them to have their children in other latitudes.

Photos: M. Porter

Yoani's blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation.