Cuba’s crisis with death

June 11, 2026/Business, Cemetery, Cremation/

Cuba, the island country only 90 miles off the Florida coast has a crisis with death and Death Care. If you look at the Wikipedia page for Cuba you will notice that the population in 2022 was estimated at over 11 million people and the estimation for 2024 was less than 10 million. . . a drop in estimated population of over 1 million people.

Many of the younger people, if they can, have left the country but the other side of that population slide equation is the number of deaths of Cuban people of “Baby Boomer” age. And, with an economy in a free-fall situation, the care of those that have died is almost non-existent.

This article from the Havana Times reflects on the death of a grandmother and the family’s quest to have her cremated. Here’s what the article says about the family’s attempt at her Death Care:

“What should have been a farewell to her grandmother turned into a scene of helplessness, putrefaction and abandonment.

In the province, as in the rest of the country, death does not put an end to hardship—it simply moves it to another stage. The family’s grief then collides with fuel shortages, blackouts, broken hearses, and a chain of informality and corruption that feeds on other people’s desperation.

Claudia still speaks of her grandmother’s death with a mix of pain and anger. “We decided to cremate her because we thought it was the fastest and most viable option,” she explains. It wasn’t the first time she had gone to the crematorium, and until then, the experience had been acceptable. This time, however, reality erased any remaining trust she had in the state-run service.

After hours of waiting with her grandmother’s body, the response was blunt: there was no liquefied gas or backup diesel to start the ovens. The family thought that leaving the body in a cold chamber might be a temporary solution, but it turned out to be another mistake forced by desperation. “We were naïve,” Claudia admits. “The chamber failed too. In the end, we had to bury her with visible signs of decomposition.”

And, burial in a cemetery does not come with any guarantees either. Here’s an explanation from a gravedigger as explained in a different article in the Havana Times about what can happen at cemeteries:

“Like many longtime gravediggers, he supplemented his meager state salary with money paid by families to care for their vaults and ossuaries. This is a common practice involving the cleaning and upkeep of funeral properties. But over the years, the second of those tasks became increasingly difficult to fulfill. . . .

. . . You don’t have to look far to find out who’s behind the thefts in the cemetery: it’s almost always the gravediggers and guards themselves,” he explains. . . .

. . . Cemetery workers keep an eye on mausoleums and ossuaries that never receive visitors and investigate their owners. Usually they belong to families who emigrated entirely or to elderly people no longer capable of taking care of them. If that’s the case, they look for a buyer, empty the vault, and sell it as if nothing happened. In the best-case scenario, the remains end up in the crematorium.”

That same article comes to a precarious conclusion that even as families cannot afford the Death Care of their loved ones and crematories are short of fuel for operation, the government has no answer either. Here’s what the article says about that, “Moreover, the government does not have many alternatives. With salaries that do not even reach ten dollars a month and almost no tools or protective equipment, very few people are willing to work in a funeral home, crematorium, or cemetery. . .”

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take: These articles also go on to tell of the public health crisis that is brewing because of the inabilty to provide for the Death Care needs of the nation’s citizens. With tropical temperatures, delays in burials, and shortages causing crematories to be potentially non-existent, there is a potential for an outbreak of some type. One of the articles quotes a Cuban worker making this comment on the public health care crisis that may evolve:

“In Cuba we have all the conditions for those ‘perfect storms’ in terms of public health: huge numbers of garbage dumps and poor environmental conditions in general, shortages of food and medicine, and a quarter of the population over 60 years old. It is only a matter of time before, every so often, there is an ‘explosion’ in deaths.”

Editor’s Note: I’m always very skeptical when I read a publication from a country such as Cuba, Russia, or China. I think it is fair to say that there is not freedom of the press in those countries so you have to look at the article you are reading through that lens. From what I understand, the Havana Times is a blog format news outlet that is published by an ex-Cuban resident living in Nicaragua.

The two articles linked from the Havana Times in today’s Funeral Director Daily article are written by two separate authors which gives me some credence that the funeral and crematory situation in Cuba is as they say it is. If the profession and the care of the deceased is as described it is definitely in a bad state of affairs.

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