Canadian headlines are full, in the year 2024, of news items about uncontrolled mass immigration and its many political consequences. So it might be worth remembering that a small country, assuming it is managed much worse than Canada is, might encounter the opposite problem: simultaneous mass abandonment by its ancestral population at working age.

This is now happening in Cuba, and the Cuban government, after three years of half-acknowledged “migration crisis,” has finally begun to learn and confess to the full dimensions of the problem. In July the country’s chief statistician admitted to a fact that even exterior and dissident demographers hadn’t quite fathomed: 10 per cent of the remaining Cuban population, about a million people out of 10, left Cuba in calendar 2023.