Population Aging in Cuba: Coping with Social Care Deficit

Abstract

Demographic aging represents a major social and economic challenge for Cuba. This chapter examines the responses and coping mechanisms developed in Cuba over the past decades with regards to aging within Fassin’s (Ann Hist Soc Sci 6(64):1237–1266, 2009) conceptual framework of moral economy. It demonstrates that the moral economies of social justice and homecare tend to conflict in a context of care deficit (Hochschild in Soc Polit 2(3):333–346, 1995). The chapter is based on several rounds of ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, and interviews conducted between 2009 and 2016 in Havana and other parts of Cuba. It first analyzes the components of demographic aging, namely the increase of life expectancy, the decrease of fertility, and migration. It then delves into public policies aiming to respond to the health care needs of the elderly, to foster their community integration, and to mitigate their impoverishment. Finally, it highlights how households develop strategies to cope with the care needs of aging relatives, in a context where market provision and institutional long-term care supplies are still incipient. Although constructed as a public problem and widely documented in Cuba, the pressure aging exerts on care systems has received little attention from social scientists. In this regard, this chapter contributes to comparative knowledge on aging in post-Soviet, Latin American and Caribbean countries.