Population: Hasta la vista, baby CUBA IS THE only Latin American country whose population is falling. It is also ageing faster than anywhere else in the region, for several reasons. First, Cuban women are having far fewer babies. The number of children per woman fell from five in 1963 to 1.9 in 1978 and to below 1.5 between 2004 and 2008. Second, thanks to good health care very few children die in infancy, and Cubans live to a ripe old age. Third, some 30,000 Cubans a year leave the island. Nowadays few of them risk their lives in rafts or rubber tyres to cross the Florida straits. Instead, they queue up for a visa. Under an agreement reached in the 1990s to deter uncontrolled migration, the United States gives out some 20,000 visas a year by lottery. Spain, which grants citizenship to the children and grandchildren of those who fled the country's civil war and the Franco dictatorship, has handed out 63,000 passports. A steady trickle of Cubans posted to Venezuela or travelling abroad choose not to return. So Cuba is getting older (see chart 2). "The typical Cuban family consists of two grandparents, two parents and one child," says Jorge Mario Sánchez of CEEC. On current trends, by 2025 there will be almost as many pensioners as workers. Pensions are low (an average of $10 a month in 2008), and pensioners are among the poorest in Cuban society. But by 2008 total pension costs had risen to 7% of GDP. The government introduced a pension reform in December 2008, raising contributions (introduced in the 1990s) and the retirement age (to 60 for women and 65 for men). But that will not be enough to make pensions self-financing, nor eliminate pensioner poverty. And those who want to emigrate are just the people the island can least afford to lose. Fear of rising emigration is the main reason why Raúl Castro says abolishing controls on leaving the island requires long and careful study.