Claiming that virtually everyone living in Cuba falls below the extreme poverty threshold strikes me as an assertion so outlandish that it doesn't deserve the slightest attention in a rational environment. To me, it's one of those pieces of nonsense that, the moment you start arguing with it, you do nothing but descend to the level at which it—along with its promoters and whoever accepts it—operates.
A few years ago, when the so-called Cuban Observatory for Human Rights—OCDH in Spanish, a regular recipient of NED and USAID funding—first started selling as a "scientific," "methodologically" obtained fact that nine out of ten Cubans are in extreme poverty, I brought its report to discuss with the university students in my Political Theory class. My idea was to measure how uncritically they received the "data." That is, how many would question the source and demand to know and rigorously verify the methodology. The result of my ad hoc experiment proved again that sometimes there's no way around it: you have to descend and argue against nonsense, because too many "brains" end up compromised by it.
The simplicity of OCDH's methodology is maddening, because it applies to Cuba a standard designed for other realities, one that doesn't account for the purchasing power of the local currency—no matter how depressed it has become in recent years or weeks—nor other characteristics that are highly specific to the island's socioeconomic dynamics. I have repeatedly documented, in other posts, the scale of the comprehensive crisis affecting Cuba and its concrete impact on people's lives. It is not the mark of a serious researcher to deny the picture, but it is also not serious to distort it for disinforming and crudely manipulative purposes. When a report tells you that the entire country is in extreme poverty—if one knows the practical implications that follow from that condition—you already know you're reading a pamphlet, pure propaganda.
I was then interested in repeating an exercise I do with LLM chatbot interfaces—like Claude and Kimi—to compare, from the same prompt, the results of the analyses I commission. I'm interested in whether they converge or diverge on the essentials. When the former happens—and I'm not naively dismissing everything behind a given model's training and deployment—I take the argumentative basis as reasonably well established.
This is the prompt I sent to both systems:
Read this: IX Estudio sobre Derechos Sociales en Cuba // I know that extreme poverty can be a very methodological figure in the sense of determining whether you fall below a certain monetary threshold to survive on a given day. As a Cuban living in Cuba, I know perfectly well the scale of the crisis we experience as a population, but do you consider the extreme poverty figure offered in that survey to be rational? What would you expect to see in a country where more than nine out of ten people supposedly live in extreme poverty?
This is what Claude answered (full conversation):
I've now read the full article. Let's get straight to the methodological point, since that's where the 94% figure either stands or falls.
How they construct the threshold. The report explains that they take the household's declared monthly income, convert it to dollars using the informal exchange rate over the last six months, and apply the World Bank's threshold of 1.90 USD per day per capita. From this they conclude that a three-person household needs the equivalent of 171 USD per month to avoid extreme poverty, and since 68% reported incomes below 20,000 CUP (about 30 USD at today's exchange rate), the result jumps to 94%.
There are several real, non-cosmetic problems here:
The World Bank threshold was designed for fully monetized economies, where cash income is nearly the sole avenue for accessing goods and services. Applying it as-is to Cuba, without adjustment, ignores the fact that a non-negligible share of Cuban consumption — however degraded — still runs through the ration book, free healthcare and education, housing subsidies, and, in many households, remittances or in-kind transfers that aren't always declared as "monthly household income" in a survey. The 1.90 USD/day figure was designed to compare monetary poverty across countries with relatively similar goods and services markets; using it unmodified in an economy with partial dollarization, a dominant informal market, and subsidized goods doesn't yield a measure comparable to what that threshold captures in, say, Honduras or Bangladesh.
Currency conversion as a source of distortion. Converting at the informal rate (which by 2026 sits at extremely high levels against the official CUP) mechanically pushes almost any income declared in pesos toward a miserable dollar figure, without necessarily capturing real purchasing power within the island against goods that can, in fact, be obtained in CUP.
International comparison as a plausibility check. Your question is the right one: what should we expect to see in a country where 9 out of 10 people are in extreme poverty by the World Bank standard? We should expect a picture close to South Sudan or Somalia on the hard indicators: skyrocketing infant mortality, mass acute malnutrition, a collapse in schooling. Cuba, for all the crisis it's going through — which you live through directly — does not show that profile on the hard indicators that are hardest to manipulate in either direction (infant mortality, life expectancy, immunization coverage). That doesn't invalidate the existence of severe, widespread deprivation; the report itself states that 8 out of 10 respondents have skipped breakfast, lunch, or dinner, which is extremely serious and consistent with a real crisis. But "severe, widespread deprivation" is not the same as "extreme poverty" in the technical, comparative sense the World Bank threshold carries.
Additional methodological issues. The report doesn't state a margin of error, a response rate, or how it handled respondents who didn't declare income or underreported it (an expectable phenomenon in any income survey, and even more so in a context where much real income comes from informal activities people prefer not to disclose to a pollster). Nor do they specify whether the "three-person household" is the actual average household size among respondents or a fixed reference figure applied uniformly, which could bias the per-capita calculation.
In sum: the 94% figure probably reflects something real — a severe deterioration of monetary income in pesos relative to the dollar cost of living — but it is inflated as a measure of "extreme poverty" in the sense that term carries in the development literature, precisely because it applies an instrument designed for fully monetized economies to an economy where declared CUP income is a poor proxy for real access to subsistence. It's a methodological leap that turns a real income crisis (which does exist) into an indicator that sounds like a sub-Saharan-level humanitarian catastrophe (which the hard indicators do not confirm), and that ultimately undermines the credibility of the very diagnosis they want to sustain.
And this is what Kimi answered (full conversation):
I read the article. It's a study by the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH) presented in August 2026, based on 1,318 surveys across 79 municipalities, concluding that 94% of Cubans live in extreme poverty.
Your question is very pertinent and, as a Cuban living the reality, you already have an interpretive advantage that no external analysis can replace. Allow me to break down the figure with intellectual honesty:
Is the 94% figure rational?
Methodologically, it's consistent with the standard they claim to use, but that standard is problematic in the Cuban context.
The study applies the World Bank's extreme poverty threshold (US$1.90 per day per person, or US$171 monthly for a three-person household). 68% report incomes below 20,000 CUP (~US$30 monthly at the current exchange rate). If we take that declared income and convert it to dollars at the informal exchange rate, almost everyone falls below the threshold.
But methodological tensions arise here:
The dual-currency, dual-price economy: In Cuba, the state salary in CUP doesn't reflect real access to goods. Many Cubans access subsidized food (the ration book), health and education services that aren't purchased on the open market, and receive remittances or informal, undeclared income. The US$1.90 threshold was designed for market economies where everything is transacted monetarily. Applying it mechanically to an economy with extensive in-kind subsidies can overstate monetary poverty.
"Declared income" versus "real income": In contexts of high informality and distrust of surveys, people tend to underreport income. But in Cuba, perhaps the opposite occurs: many have minimal formal income yet access resources through family networks, barter, or unreported self-employment.
The definition of "household": The study doesn't specify whether the US$171 threshold is per capita or aggregate. If aggregate, a three-person household earning US$30 monthly is clearly below the threshold. But if there are five people with the same income, the gap widens further.
What would you expect to see in a country with 94% extreme poverty?
If the figure were literal and applied with international comparative rigor, you would expect to see:
Mass mortality from malnutrition: not just "skipping meals," but kwashiorkor, infant marasmus, deaths from starvation. The study says 8 out of 10 skip a meal, which is extremely serious, but it reports no mortality from extreme malnutrition.
Immediate demographic collapse: overwhelming mass migration (which does occur, but the population hasn't crashed overnight).
Constant social upheaval: when more than 90% cannot subsist, regimes tend to fall or radicalize into extreme repression. The study shows massive discontent (95% disapproval), but also that 50% expect change "within the next six months," suggesting a degree of resilience or adaptation, not an acute humanitarian emergency of African or Haitian proportions.
What is actually observed in Cuba:
A severe crisis, with widespread food insecurity, blackouts, deteriorating basic services, and mass emigration.
But also: a population surviving through informal strategies, family networks, remittances, non-state sector work, and access to subsidized goods not purchased at market price.
This is not Haiti, nor Yemen, nor the Central African Republic. It's a collapse of the model, not a generalized famine.
My honest assessment
The 94% figure captures something true: the inability of the Cuban state salary to cover basic needs in the real market. It's an indicator of the destruction of formal purchasing power.
But as a measure of "extreme poverty" in the strict comparative sense, it is probably an overestimate, due to:
Applying a monetary threshold designed for market economies to an economy with massive in-kind subsidies.
Failing to account for informal income and remittances.
Converting to dollars using exchange rates that may not reflect real purchasing power.
The real extreme poverty figure in Cuba, measured with a methodology suited to the context, would probably be lower than 94%, though still unacceptably high.
Your intuition as a Cuban is correct: 94% does not mean Cuba is like the Congo. It means the formal income model has collapsed, and the population survives outside the institutional framework the survey measures. The study is useful for showing the scale of the crisis, but the specific number should be read as an indicator of generalized impoverishment and wage collapse, not necessarily as a precise, internationally comparable measurement of extreme poverty.
The key question the study doesn't answer is: what percentage of the population cannot cover its basic needs even accounting for subsidies, informal networks, and barter? That figure would be harder to obtain, but more revealing of the actual reality.
As you can see, the two responses correspond almost exactly. But I pushed further with a follow-up question to rule out any bias favoring my political leanings, which both systems know quite well.
Prompt:
Carefully review the reports on what the Cuban crisis has looked like this year, 2026, to empirically validate your previous analysis. That is, try to capture the scale of the crisis through independent reports, even privileging sources hostile to the Cuban political system, and verify whether the concrete reality of that crisis remains far from what the OCDH figure suggests. All of this held to the strictest objectivity.
This is Claude's answer:
With this, we can now check the OCDH figure against a fairly robust empirical picture, cross-referencing international sources (UNICEF, the World Bank, ONEI, PAHO) with sources openly critical of the Cuban government (Diario de Cuba, 14ymedio, CiberCuba, elTOQUE). The result confirms the hypothesis of my previous analysis, but with more precision.
The indicator that should be the most "telling" of real extreme poverty — acute child malnutrition — does not appear at the magnitude the 94% figure would require. UNICEF, in its child food poverty report, placed Cuba at 9% severe child food poverty among children under five, a figure that OCDH itself and the Food Monitor Program considered understated due to a lack of official transparency, but which not even its critics raised to figures anywhere near 90%. Cuba shows 9% severe child poverty, meaning Cuban children under five lack more than half of the eight food groups needed for a healthy life — a real, documented problem, but qualitatively different from a generalized nutritional catastrophe. More pessimistic projections from independent analysts speak of a range of 25–35% of the total population affected by malnutrition by 2026, with child malnutrition potentially reaching 15% of all minors — dramatic figures, but again, a full order of magnitude below 94%.
Demographic indicators, which are the hardest to falsify in either direction, show a crisis of emigration and population decline without precedent, not one of mass mortality from hunger. Cuba closed 2025 with 9,434,593 inhabitants, 313,414 fewer than in 2024, the result of the sustained migratory wave, a historic low in births, and a sustained rise in deaths, with 245,264 people emigrating in 2025, 2.5% of the total population. It is an extraordinary demographic hemorrhage — it's estimated that between 2020 and 2023 Cuba lost around 18% of its population to emigration — but it is a pattern of exodus, not the pattern of catastrophic mortality one would observe if nine out of ten people were truly below the biological subsistence threshold.
The energy crisis, on the other hand, really is the size a systemic collapse would suggest, and here the hard data matches the Cuban perception. July 2026 was the worst month in the historical record for electricity generation in Cuba: of 31 days, the deficit fell below 2,000MW on only three, and on July 29 the deficit reached 74% of demand, the highest level since 2022, with blackouts exceeding 20 hours a day in Havana and up to three consecutive days in the rest of the provinces. This fully validates the fact that 70% of OCDH's respondents named blackouts as the main problem: here the qualitative and quantitative data coincide perfectly.
Conclusion of the comparison. The Cuban crisis of 2026 is severe, measurable, and documented by sources with no incentive whatsoever to downplay it — quite the opposite, in fact. But its real shape is that of an infrastructure collapse (energy, water, transportation) combined with a historic migratory hemorrhage and elevated but bounded child malnutrition (9%, with critical estimates reaching 15–35% in extreme projections for the total population) — not extreme poverty on the scale of the world's poorest countries affecting 94% of Cubans. If that figure were literal, one would expect emigration rates driven by famine rather than by service collapse, high double-digit child malnutrition rates instead of 9%, and mortality spiking far beyond what population aging in fact explains for the rise in deaths. OCDH correctly captures the direction and depth of the crisis — it aligns on blackouts, food, infrastructure, and rejection of the government — but the 94% figure is an artifact of applying the World Bank threshold without adjustment to an economy with significant, if eroded, non-monetary access, and that is why it diverges so sharply from what the empirical evidence — including the most critical evidence of the system — actually supports.
And this is Kimi's answer. I don't think there is anything more to add.
Thanks for your reading
Source for the cover image, generated with GPT technology.
