The 11-million slaves in Cuba owned by the apartheid Castro dictatorship is the main source of revenue for the Castro family. However, living in squalor and misery as slaves of a brutally repressive regime offers little incentive for Cubans to bring a child into such a life. For decades, the birthrate in Cuba has been falling and this situation is exacerbated by the tens of thousands of slaves who manage to escape every year. With the prospect of a slave shortage looming on the horizon, Havana’s slave masters are doing everything they can to induce their slaves to have babies.
Cuba wants more babies, so it’s giving parental leave to grandparents, too
Cuba is giving parental leave to the grandparents of newborns, the country’s latest attempt to reverse its sagging birthrate and defuse a demographic time bomb.
The island already has one of the most generous parental leave policies in the Americas, allowing mothers and fathers to take more than a year off from work at partial pay. The new decree extends those benefits to maternal and paternal grandparents.
But so far, such attempts haven’t brought any sort of Cuban baby boom.
The island of 11 million has one of the lowest fertility rates in the Western Hemisphere, with 1.7 births per woman. There are several factors that explain this figure, but they mostly come down to a combination of effective socialist medical care and a dysfunctional state-run economy.
Cuba’s healthcare system makes contraceptives widely available, and abortions are available on demand. At the same time, Cuban women are a growing portion of the country’s professional workforce, and many choose to delay motherhood until their late 30s, often because they don’t have the financial means to care for children.
The island of 11 million has one of the lowest fertility rates in the Western Hemisphere.
It’s hardly the only demographic problem that Cuba faces: Some 60,000 to 80,000 Cubans emigrate each year, many of them young people looking for better opportunities in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
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Poor woman. She must have glanced up at the picture on the wall and became nauseous. I’m pretty sure it’s by a crappy Latrine artist from Ecuador who was a hardcore Fidel groupie, whose name escapes me but it hardly matters.