Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean at roughly 110,860 square kilometres, stretching about 1,250 kilometres from west to east but never more than around 190 kilometres wide. It is not a single island but an archipelago of more than 4,000 cays and islets, and about a quarter of its terrain is mountainous, with the rest divided between rolling plains and some of the most productive agricultural soil in the region.
An Archipelago, Not a Single Island
Maps show Cuba as one long shape, and that shape dominates: the main island accounts for the overwhelming bulk of the land area. But the Republic of Cuba comprises several distinct groups.
Isla de la Juventud, off the southwestern coast, is the second-largest at about 2,200 square kilometres — larger than several sovereign Caribbean states. Beyond it lie four main cay archipelagos: Los Colorados along the northwest, Sabana-Camagüey (also called Jardines del Rey) along the north-central coast, Jardines de la Reina to the south, and Los Canarreos in the southwest. Sabana-Camagüey alone contains several hundred cays, some of them linked to the mainland by causeways built to serve resort development.
Cuba's position is as significant as its size. It sits at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico, with the Straits of Florida roughly 150 kilometres to the north separating it from Key West, the Yucatán Channel about 210 kilometres to the west, and the Windward Passage some 77 kilometres to the east dividing it from Hispaniola. Every ship entering or leaving the Gulf passes close by. That geography made Havana the assembly point for Spanish treasure fleets for two centuries and has shaped Cuban strategic history ever since.
Three Mountain Systems and the Plains Between Them
Cuba's relief is concentrated at the two ends and in the middle, with lowlands filling the gaps.
The Sierra Maestra in the southeast is the dominant range and contains Pico Turquino, the highest point at about 1,974 metres. It rises abruptly from a narrow southern coastal strip, and offshore the seabed drops into the Cayman Trench, which reaches depths beyond 7,500 metres — meaning the vertical distance from Pico Turquino to the trench floor exceeds 9,000 metres within a relatively short horizontal span. The Sierra Maestra's inaccessibility made it the base for insurgencies repeatedly, most famously between 1956 and 1958.
The Escambray mountains in the centre, near Trinidad and Cienfuegos, reach around 1,150 metres at Pico San Juan. They are gentler and wetter than the Sierra Maestra, and their slopes support coffee.
The Guaniguanico range in the far west, in Pinar del Río province, is the smallest and the most visually distinctive, described below.
Between and around these, plains cover roughly two-thirds of the country. The largest continuous lowland runs through Camagüey and Ciego de Ávila in the centre-east, flat savanna given over to cattle and sugar. The plains of Matanzas and Havana provinces in the west hold the deep red soils that made Cuban sugar production formidable in the nineteenth century.
Karst, Mogotes and the Caves Beneath Pinar del Río
Much of Cuba is built on limestone, and where that limestone has been dissolved by water over millions of years the landscape becomes karst — sinkholes, underground drainage and caves.
The most striking expression is the Viñales Valley in Pinar del Río, where isolated limestone towers called mogotes rise sheer from a flat valley floor. These are erosional remnants: the surrounding rock dissolved away and the more resistant blocks were left standing, sometimes 300 metres high with vertical or overhanging sides. Similar formations occur in southern China and Vietnam, and the Cuban examples are considered among the finest in the Americas. The valley is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the flat floor between the mogotes grows tobacco.
Beneath the karst run extensive cave systems. The Gran Caverna de Santo Tomás in Pinar del Río extends over 45 kilometres across multiple levels, one of the largest cave networks in Latin America.
Cuba's rivers are numerous but short, a direct consequence of the island's narrowness — water has little distance to travel before reaching the sea. The Cauto in the southeast is the longest at roughly 340 kilometres and the only one navigable for any useful distance. Much of the island's freshwater moves underground through the limestone rather than on the surface, and groundwater supplies a large share of domestic and agricultural use.
Trade Winds, Hurricanes and a Tale of Two Seasons
Cuba has a tropical climate moderated by its narrowness and by the northeast trade winds, which blow across the island year-round and prevent the oppressive still heat found in continental tropics at the same latitude.
There are two seasons rather than four. The dry season runs November to April, with average temperatures around 21 to 26 Celsius and low humidity — the pleasant half of the year, and the tourist high season. The wet season runs May to October, hotter at around 27 to 32 Celsius, considerably more humid, and delivering the bulk of the roughly 1,300 millimetres of annual rainfall.
Hurricanes are the defining climatic hazard. The Atlantic season runs from June to November, peaking in September and October, and Cuba's position across the main tracks means direct strikes are frequent. Major storms have repeatedly caused severe damage to housing, agriculture and the electrical grid. Cuba's civil defence and evacuation system is widely regarded as unusually effective for a country of its income level, and death tolls from storms are typically far lower than in neighbouring territories hit by the same systems, even where property damage is comparable.
Soil, Nickel and the Geography of the Cuban Economy
Cuba's economic geography follows its physical geography closely.
The western and central plains carry deep, fertile soils that supported the sugar industry which dominated the economy from the eighteenth century until the 1990s. Sugar's collapse after the loss of Soviet markets left large areas of cane land idle, and much has since reverted to scrub or been converted to other uses.
Tobacco is grown on a much smaller footprint but with outsized value, concentrated in the Vuelta Abajo district of Pinar del Río. The combination of soil chemistry, drainage and humidity there produces leaf regarded as the world's finest for cigars, and the growing area is remarkably compact — a few tens of thousands of hectares.
The mineral story is in the east. Cuba holds some of the world's largest nickel and cobalt reserves, concentrated in lateritic deposits in Holguín province around Moa and Nicaro. Nickel has for years been among Cuba's leading commodity exports. There are also modest oil reserves along the north coast near Varadero, heavy and high in sulphur, meeting part of domestic demand.
Tourism is now the dominant foreign-currency earner, and it is geographically concentrated on the north coast beaches — Varadero on the Hicacos Peninsula, and the cays of Sabana-Camagüey reached by causeway — plus Havana and the colonial centres of Trinidad and Cienfuegos.
Cuba Measured Against Hispaniola and Jamaica
Cuba's dominance of the Greater Antilles becomes clear in comparison. At about 110,860 square kilometres it is larger than Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which totals roughly 76,000. It is roughly ten times the size of Jamaica at about 11,000 square kilometres, and about twelve times Puerto Rico at around 9,100.
But Cuba is comparatively flat. Hispaniola holds Pico Duarte at about 3,100 metres — more than half again Pico Turquino's height — and its interior is far more rugged, which historically fragmented settlement and communication. Jamaica's Blue Mountains reach about 2,256 metres on an island a tenth of Cuba's size, making it proportionally far steeper. Cuba's long plains gave it something its neighbours lacked: large contiguous areas suitable for mechanised plantation agriculture, which is the underlying reason Cuban sugar output dwarfed theirs.
Population tells a different story. Cuba has around 11 million people on the largest island; Hispaniola supports over 22 million on two-thirds the area. Cuba is by a considerable margin the least densely populated of the Greater Antilles. The wider regional picture is set out in our Caribbean geography guide.
Coastlines, Cays and the Guantánamo Anomaly
Cuba's coastline runs roughly 5,700 kilometres and differs sharply between its two sides. The north coast is largely limestone, with cliffs, pocket beaches and long strings of offshore cays sheltering shallow lagoons. The south coast is lower and swampier, with extensive mangrove — the Zapata Peninsula holds the largest wetland in the insular Caribbean, a Ramsar site and biosphere reserve supporting crocodiles and large numbers of migratory birds.
The island's deep bays are a notable asset. Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Cienfuegos, Nipe and Guantánamo are all "pouch-shaped" harbours — narrow entrances opening into wide, deep, sheltered basins. These are drowned river valleys, flooded when sea levels rose after the last glaciation, and they are among the best natural harbours in the hemisphere.
Guantánamo Bay is the geographical oddity. Under a 1903 lease agreement following the Spanish-American War, the United States holds roughly 116 square kilometres around the bay on the southeastern coast. Cuba disputes the arrangement's continuing validity. It remains the only US military base on the territory of a state with which Washington has no normal diplomatic relations, and a fenced land boundary — not a coastline — separates it from the rest of Cuba. For the fuller national picture beyond the physical setting, see our Cuba country guide.