14ymedio, Yaxis Cires, Madrid, 20 May 2024 — Last summer 27% of Cuban households received some sort of remittance from relatives living abroad according to a 2023 report* by the Madrid-based Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH). This is a significant reduction compared to the previous two years (34% and 37%, respectively) and is presumably due to efforts by many families to help their relatives get out of Cuba by any means possible. Another factor for the decline could be a certain level of donor fatigue after decades of not being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Faced with daily challenges such as power outages, shortages of food, medicine and transportation as well as the lack of basic freedoms, many Cubans rely on aid from abroad just to get by. This is especially true for retirees, whose monthly pensions are worth less than a carton of 30 eggs or a kilogram of powdered milk. But nothing is easy on the island, which many on the international left portray as the model of social rights.
According to the aforement