When the year 2019 arrives, the people who were born in 1959, with the triumph of the Revolution, will have reached the age of 60, and thus they will be entering the so-called third age.

It is a new context for Cuban society, and it constitutes a different dimension in terms of what this older adult population represents, its characteristics and indicators of human development, emphasized the Granma newspaper, Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, director of the Center for Population Studies and Development of the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI).

According to the specialist, this is a transcendental topic for Cuba, with more than 2 100 000 elderly

people, who make up a very heterogeneous population.

«In its accelerated aging process, the Greater Antillean is approaching to become one of the economically aged societies.

This means that the cost of care for the elderly will be, even within the next five years, higher than the cost of care for children and adolescents, in addition in a country where these latter age groups have a high priority.

"This requires us to assess not only a new reality from the economic point of view, but cultural, values and intergenerational relationships, which must be accompanied by policies of participation, health, education and care, among others," said the expert.

For Alfonso Fraga, in Cuba, with more than 20% of its population aged 60 and over, we must understand and study very well the attention and participation of the elderly, who pass for considering them as subjects of law.

"We need a cultural dimension of the aging process both for the elderly themselves and for society. We age faster than we learned to do it; but how to treat older adults, how they deal with each other, what their space is in society, what their potential and needs are ... ", the specialist reflected.

On the other hand, the interviewee commented that each person ages as they live. One thing is the individual aging and another the population, and it is urgent to place the elderly at the center of policies in many of our countries is not divorced from the fact that investing in childhood, adolescence and youth is still fundamental because they will be the elders of tomorrow.

The Cuban aging process is the most advanced in the region along with countries such as Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Caribbean nations such as Barbados.
If before there were many grandchildren to care for grandparents, today that proportion has been reversed and we have more grandparents than grandchildren.

Among the characteristics of this population thrown by the Population and Housing Census and in line with trends in developed countries, about 13% of older adults live alone and another 10% coexist with other older adults without the presence of any young person in the home.

The persistence of low fertility in the country, together with other factors such as the negative migratory balance and high life expectancy, are elements that increase this process, also marked by the feminization of aging, where many women are left alone at the end of the life, Fraga Alfonso concluded.

The presentation of Cuba on its sui generis demographic dynamics in the region, accompanied by a high social development, which has allowed to create the bases for the attention to this population group in an integral way, constituted a reference for other countries participating in the Third Meeting of the recently held Regional Conference on Population and Development, said Dr. Alberto Fernández Seco, head of the Department of the Elderly, Social Welfare and Mental Health of the Ministry of Public Health.

"We can not design policies for people who do not contemplate their needs and criteria, and in the case of older adults, if we want friendly societies we must include them and take them into account. They are not just a tributary population of care, they are the living history of the people, and in the case of Cuba we feel great pride in our elderly: the leading generation of the great social changes in our country,” he said.