Havana, Sep 11 (IANS/EFE): People over 60 will make up 31 percent of Cuba's population by 2030, the official weekly Trabajadores said days before the start of the island's 2012 census.

The publication says that the over-60 cohort currently represents 18.1 percent of Cuba's 11.2 million residents.

Among the Cuban provinces with the oldest populations are La Habana, Villa Clara and Sancti Spiritus.

At the other end of the scale, the province of Guantanamo, on the island's far eastern end, is the one with the youngest average population.

In Cuba, the average life expectancy is 78 years overall: 76 years for men and just over 80 years for women.

The island's Communist government has repeatedly expressed its concern about the phenomenon and even decided to increase the retirement age.

The growth rate of the Cuban population has been lessening gradually since 1959, the year of the Revolution, despite some spikes in the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, Trabajadores said.

Thanks to the upcoming census, the country's population, age and sex statistics will soon be updated, along with those figures for individual provinces and the housing situation.

The census will also collect data on educational levels, family composition, the number of housewives, workers, students and retirees, the number and location of homes, when they were built and the materials used.

To conduct the new survey, the country was divided into 1,578 census areas, and the data will be processed by more than 15,700 workers, while 53,800 students - overseen by several thousand supervisors - will act as census-takers visiting citizens' homes to gather the information.