News · Society
Retirees have gone months without their pensions, per complaints to Díaz-Canel's radio program
Listeners to the third edition of “Criterio Compartido,” the program Miguel Díaz-Canel hosts on Radio Rebelde, reported on Wednesday pensions unpaid since February, older people with no place in care homes and families with disabled children left without institutional support, according to CiberCuba's report.
Ada Linares Mejía said on the third edition of “Criterio Compartido,” the program that ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel hosts every two weeks on Radio Rebelde, that her husband signed his retirement papers in February and has not received a single peso. After months of complaints, she was told that the software that processes the files “had broken down,” according to CiberCuba's report on the broadcast.
Díaz-Canel replied that “it makes no sense for there to be mistreatment in the handling of a retirement” and that “we have to see who got it wrong,” in remarks translated by Yamacoa. Other listeners raised different cases: a man has spent months waiting for an answer from a nursing home in Marianao to admit his parents, aged 88 and 84; a woman asked for care for a mother with mental health problems and two children with disabilities; and a man with a visual disability, like his mother, his daughter and his wife, requested a space where the family could work. He told them all: “You will all be attended to.”
The broadcast followed up on the case of Regla Yudith Montiagudo, who was asking to be recognized as the caregiver of her 35-year-old son, who has a disability, diabetes and an amputated leg. Municipal authorities had denied her that recognition, even though Decree 121 of 2025 provides for it as paid work; on 12 October, after the case was aired on the previous broadcast, she was granted home assistant service and the family received a wheelchair from the Quisicuaba project.
Labor and Social Security Minister Jesús Otamendiz Campos took part by phone and reported that more than 883,000 people were registered as vulnerable at the end of September, up from the 876,522 initially identified, and that the state distributes modules of five pounds of rice, one pound of split peas and one pound of sugar with support from the World Food Programme.
At the close of the program, Díaz-Canel devoted several minutes to Washington's “pressure” ahead of the 28 October United Nations vote on the embargo and described an event organized by the United States delegation as “a clandestine meeting with a panel paid for by the State Department.” The next broadcast is scheduled for 4 November.
Sources: CiberCuba · Serie Yamacoa: Dólar en el mercado informal (elTOQUE (tasa representativa))
Data updated: 2026-10-22T17:45:00.000Z