Cuba faces a labor shortage and businesspeople start hiring inmates and looking for professionals in other countries 

Due to severe labor shortages, companies in Cuba hire detainees to work in factories. Understand how this initiative works and the impacts on the country's economy.

The severe shortage of labor, resulting from the largest exodus recorded in Cuba since the triumph of the revolution in 1959, led a sugar company in the country to hire inmates to fulfill its production plan, as stated by the company's director. This unusual measure appears as a temporary solution to meet production demands amid the worker crisis. Additionally, the company is considering expanding its hiring to include professionals from other countries, seeking to fill the gaps left by mass migration.

Cuban company hires inmates due to labor shortage

Amaury Depestre, deputy for the central province of Cienfuegos and director of the sugar factory, on July 14, explained that to complete the last harvest and fulfill the plan, he had to look for extra personnel, including 113 prisoners joined the task.

During a debate on Monday night, before the parliamentary session that will take place this Wednesday, Depestre, cited by the pro-government portal Cubadebate, did not specify under what conditions the Cuban company hires detainees.

However, since March, Cubans and foreigners serving prison sentences have a rule that establishes their right to work inside and outside the country's prisons, as well as the labor and salary treatment to be received. 

It is not the first time that directors of companies or deputies in Cuba have complained about the shortage of labor in agriculture, historically affected by the exodus from the countryside to the city. To this phenomenon are now added an unprecedented emigration and the displacement of farm workers for better-paying jobs, especially in the growing local private sector.

Depestre called on Cuban deputies to put “in focus” on salaries in the sector and the emigration that has been punishing it for some years. Since 2021, the state group AzCuba has been trying to stop the sector's decline, but the 2022-2023 harvest reached only 350 thousand tons of sugar, 4,4% of what Cuba produced until the beginning of the 1990s. 

More than half a million Cubans enter the US

The president of the AzCuba, Julio García, did not inform parliamentarians about the final results of the harvest that concluded in May and that Cuba had to carry out with “little availability of lubricants, fuels and other inputs”.

The wave of migration of Cubans recorded since the end of 2021 is unprecedented, while the communist island is immersed in its worst economic crisis in three decades, with skyrocketing inflation, blackouts and shortages of food, fuel and medicine.

More than 560 Cubans entered the United States irregularly from January 2022 to May 2024, according to the US Customs and Border Protection Agency, and almost 100 flew directly to the country due to a temporary stay permit known as Parole , which was implemented in January 2023 by the Joe Biden government. There is no official figure for Cuban migration to other countries in Latin America and Europe.

Brazil also hires prison labor

Cuba hires inmates due to a shortage of labor, but it is not the first to do this, as, based on the work carried out inside and outside prison units, prisoners can develop new skills, expand their opportunities in the professional field for their return to social life and also reduce the time of the sentence to be served.

Prison labor is being used to adapt the headquarters of the Secretariat of Penal and Socio-Educational Systems (SSPS) and the Fernando Ferrari Administrative Center (Caff). Currently, 12.211 inmates carry out some type of work activity in Rio Grande do Sul alone. Of these, 11.396 are men and 815 are women, according to data from the Criminal Police from December last year.