Havana is strikingly empty. The Cuban capital’s Plaza de la Revolución—the vast open square flanked by government ministries bearing the giant steel faces of revolutionary leaders Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos—stands all but deserted. In many neighborhoods, residents have grown used to living next to empty houses. In the countryside, so many clergy have left that a single priest often serves three or four parishes, and crops ripen unpicked for lack of labor. One farm located two hours east of Havana used to employ two hundred workers; today it has two dozen, half of them over the age of sixty. The manager said that he has vacancies to fill and money to hire. What he cannot find is people.

An estimated 1.6 to 2.75 million Cubans—roughly 13 to 25 percent of the population—have left the island since 2020; the low-end figure comes from Cuban officials, the high-end figure from Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos Espiñeira, a leading Cuban demographer and researcher at the Christian Center for Reflection and Dialogue in Cuba. The scale is unprecedented in Cuban history, with few modern parallels outside active war zones.

Cubans have migrated in large numbers before: some 250,000 after the 1959 revolution, a similar number during the 1965–73 Freedom Flights, and later waves such as the 1980 Mariel Boatlift and the 1994 rafter crisis, when tens of thousands headed for Florida on homemade vessels. And yet the outflow that began in 2021 is now three times larger than all those episodes combined.

It began as a response to Cuba’s post-pandemic economic collapse and a renewed crackdown on dissent. But the latest emigration wave has become an engine of crisis in its own right, compounding other problems. Public services are failing, in part because so many teachers, doctors, and nurses have left. A divide is widening between Cubans with family abroad—who have foreign currency and often a foothold in the island’s fledgling private sector—and the many without.

As migration separates families, crime seems to be rising among youth left behind without stable homes. And a graying society may no longer be able to muster the mass street protests that many, including the Trump administration, hope could dislodge the island’s long-standing one-party rule.

Even in the best case, which would see Cuba turn from authoritarianism and central planning toward democracy and a social market economy, the demographic challenge will remain. Some sanctions can be lifted in a day, and investment may return over the years, but there is no equivalent timetable or tested mechanism for enticing back millions of people. Cuba can still recover. But it will have to do so as a smaller, older country and design its path accordingly.

A series of forces converged to put countless other Cubans in Anita’s position. A primary one was homegrown. Cuba’s chronically mismanaged, centrally planned economy had kept growth feeble and much of the population dependent on meager subsidies and poorly paid state jobs for decades. Since opening to tourism in the 1990s and building schemes that let the military and other insiders capture much of the profits, the regime had also reordered its priorities, redirecting public capital investment from health, education, or agriculture to hotels, tourism, and real estate.

When a series of shocks arrived—the COVID-19 pandemic, tightened U.S. sanctions and a ban on U.S. tourists visiting the island during the first Trump administration, and a collapse in Venezuelan oil production, the island’s main energy source—the Cuban economy had no capacity to absorb them.

So began an economic crisis even more devastating, in some respects, than the so-called Special Period of the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union and the aid it provided Havana triggered widespread deprivation in Cuba. Chronic underinvestment in the energy grid and fuel shortages drove increasingly frequent blackouts, while a sweeping monetary, wage, and price reform shredded Cubans’ purchasing power and sent inflation soaring. On July 11, 2021, tens of thousands took to the streets on a scale not seen for decades to protest these conditions and demand freedom. The regime arrested more than seven hundred people and implemented even harsher anti-dissent laws.

With protesters now facing punishing crackdowns and Cubans’ living conditions continually worsening, many decided that the only way to better their lives was to leave the island.