Cuba’s infant mortality rate decreased in 2023

The infant mortality rate in Cuba during the year 2023 was 7.1 per thousand live births, which represents a decrease with respect to the year 2022, when a rate of 7.5 was reported.

The Ministry of Public Health reports on its website the statements of Dr. Catherine Chibás Pérez, national head of the Maternal and Infant Program (PAMI), who explained that six provinces reached numbers below the country’s average.

The best indicators corresponded to Pinar del Río with 3.1; Artemisa with 3.9; Holguín with 4.7; Sancti Spíritus with 4.8; Villa Clara with 5.7 and Matanzas with 6.9.

In 2023, 25 municipalities reported no deaths of children under one year of age, although unfortunately the highest incidences occurred with four deaths in Pinar del Río, and the same number in Artemisa and Matanzas.

Chibás Pérez added several territories that, although they do not manage to show rates lower than the national average, they do improve in proportion to their behavior during 2022. Among those cases is Havana, which decreases from an infant mortality rate of 9.5 in 2022 to 7.9 in 2023.

The same happened in Santiago de Cuba, which from a rate of 9.9 now has 8.0; and Guantánamo, which drops from 9.7 to 9.0.

Lastly, Mayabeque managed to reduce its infant mortality rate from 12.2 to 9.1 per thousand live births during the period analyzed.

Preliminary data from the Directorate of Medical Records and Statistics of Minsap report 90,374 live births at the end of the year, and a decrease in the preschool mortality rate from 4.1 to 3.6 per 10,000 inhabitants, with 35 fewer deaths in this age group. The school-age mortality rate also decreased from 2.4 to 2.1 per 10,000 population, representing 28 fewer deaths than in 2022.

Similarly, the good news extends to the maternal mortality rate in Cuba, which drops from 40.9 in 2022 to 38.7 per 100,000 live births in 2023.

The infant mortality rate for congenital defects also decreased in 2023, falling from 1.0 per 1,000 live births at the end of 2022 to 0.7, which equals the figure for 2020 and is the lowest recorded for congenital malformations in Cuba and the best indicator of its kind in the Americas.

In the last eight years, the rate of mother-to-child transmission of HIV has been equal to or less than 2% and the conditions that accredited us as the first country to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV-AIDS and syphilis in the region are maintained.