Cuba vs Costa Rica Compared: Size, Politics, Health and Wildlife

Cuba is the bigger of the two by a wide margin: its official area is 109,884 km², a little more than twice Costa Rica’s 51,180 km² or so. Cuba also has about twice the people, 9,748,007 in 2024 according to its statistics office (ONEI), against 5,044,197 counted in Costa Rica’s 2022 census. Costa Rica is the richer country by any measure of what money buys: the IMF puts its GDP per person at about US$19,100 for 2025, while the World Bank estimate for Cuba was about US$9,500 in 2020. Havana is Cuba’s capital and San José is Costa Rica’s, and Spanish is the official language of both.

Cuba’s 4,195 Islands and Costa Rica’s Isthmus in Numbers

Both have coasts on the Caribbean Sea, but their shapes could hardly be more different. Cuba is an archipelago of 4,195 islands, islets and cays, dominated by a main island 1,250 km long that covers 104,338 km² on its own and is the largest island in the Caribbean. The second island, Isla de la Juventud, adds 2,204 km². Costa Rica is a strip of the Central American isthmus with coasts on both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, land borders with Nicaragua to the north and Panama to the southeast, and one distant possession, Cocos Island, far out in the Pacific.

The population gap is shrinking from Cuba’s side. Cuba counted 11,167,325 people in its 2012 census; ONEI’s effective population fell to 10,055,968 by the end of 2023, 9,748,007 in 2024 and 9,434,593 in 2025, as a fertility rate of about 1.43 children per woman combined with heavy emigration of younger adults. Cuba’s median age of 39.5 is the oldest in the Americas. Costa Rica is still growing slowly, and an estimated 10 to 15 percent of its residents, some 400,000 to 600,000 people, are Nicaraguans.

Income figures need a warning label. Cuba’s official exchange rate of 24 pesos to the US dollar is far stronger than the informal market rate, so UN data that convert Cuban output at the official rate produce a nominal figure near US$23,000 per person for 2024. That number says more about the exchange rate than about living standards in a country whose GDP shrank by more than 10 percent between 2018 and 2024. Costa Rica, by contrast, is classed by the World Bank as a high-income economy and is the only OECD member in Central America and the Caribbean.

Relief differs just as sharply. Cuba is mostly flat to rolling plain, with real mountains only in the Sierra Maestra of the southeast, where Pico Turquino rises to 1,974 m. Costa Rica is a spine of volcanic and fold mountains: Cerro Chirripó in the Cordillera de Talamanca reaches 3,819 m, and Irazú, the highest volcano, 3,431 m.

Havana’s One-Party State and San José’s Army-Free Democracy

The political systems diverged in the same decade. In Costa Rica, a disputed presidential election in 1948 led to a brief civil war, after which José Figueres Ferrer’s victorious junta abolished the military on 1 December 1948. The ban was written into Article 12 of the 1949 constitution, and the budget once spent on soldiers was redirected to security, education and culture. Costa Rica has held presidential elections every four years since 1958; the current president, Laura Fernández Delgado, took office on 8 May 2026, and laws pass through a single-chamber Legislative Assembly of 57 deputies.

Cuba took the opposite road. The 26th of July Movement overthrew Fulgencio Batista in January 1959, and Fidel Castro’s government became a communist state that remains in place. Under the constitution ratified in 2019, the Communist Party of Cuba is the only legal party and the “leading force of society and of the state”. The 470-member National Assembly of People’s Power has one candidate per seat, chosen by nominating committees the party controls. Miguel Díaz-Canel was chosen by the Assembly as head of state in April 2018, became the country’s president under the new constitution in 2019, and took over from Raúl Castro as First Secretary of the party on 19 April 2021, the most powerful post in the country. Where Costa Rica has no army at all, Cuba built the largest armed forces per head in Latin America during the Cold War.

Remittances, Doctors Abroad and Medical Devices: Two Export Models

Both economies once lived on plantation crops, sugar and tobacco in Cuba, coffee and then bananas in Costa Rica, and both now depend heavily on visitors. After that, the models part ways.

Cuba’s largest earners since the Soviet collapse of 1991, which cut GDP by a third between 1990 and 1993, have been tourism, money sent home by Cubans abroad, and the export of skilled labour. Remittances reached about US$6.6 billion in 2019 before falling to roughly US$2 billion in 2020 as the pandemic cut travel. Tens of thousands of Cuban medical staff have worked overseas, including as many as 30,000 doctors in Venezuela under an oil-for-doctors arrangement. Visitor numbers reached about 3 million in 2012, historically led by Canadians and Europeans, then fell by 75 percent in 2020. Cuba’s main goods exports in 2022 were nickel oxide and other nickel products, rum, cigars, unwrought zinc and raw cane sugar; sugar, once 35 percent of the world export market, has fallen to about 10 percent.

Costa Rica sells manufactured goods. Foreign firms in its Free Trade Zones, among them Intel, Abbott Laboratories and Baxter Healthcare, turned the country into an exporter of medical instruments, which led all exports in 2015 at about US$2 billion, ahead of bananas. Tourism has earned more foreign exchange than bananas, pineapples and coffee combined since 1999; in 2016 about a million visitors came from the United States alone. Pineapples remain a farm export of world rank, with over half the global market, while coffee has shrunk to under 1 percent of world output.

Life Expectancy in Cuba and Costa Rica Since 2014

Cuba’s free universal health service and its record ratio of doctors to population have long made it a regional reference point. After 1959 it outperformed most of Latin America on infant mortality, which fell from 32 deaths per 1,000 births in 1957 to 5.13 in 2009. Costa Rica built its own universal system through the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social, founded in 1941, and in 1977 the US aid agency ended its health programme there because the country was judged too healthy to need it. The Nicoya Peninsula is one of the world’s so-called Blue Zones, where unusually many people pass 100.

Recent data favour Costa Rica. World Bank estimates put its life expectancy at 81.0 years in 2024 against Cuba’s 78.3, and Cuba took a far deeper hit during the pandemic, dropping to 73.2 years in 2021. Cuban hospitals face frequent shortages of medicines and equipment, and doctors’ salaries are low, even though there is no shortage of medical staff.

From Viñales to Corcovado: Biodiversity and National Parks

Cuba’s wildlife is defined by isolation. A national inventory records 17,801 animal and 9,107 plant species, and many are found nowhere else: the bee hummingbird, at 55 mm the smallest bird known, the Cuban crocodile, the Cuban solenodon and the tocororo, or Cuban trogon, the national bird. Alejandro de Humboldt National Park in Holguín and Guantánamo, inscribed by UNESCO in 2001, covers 711 km² of wet mountain forest on serpentine soils and is described as the most humid place in Cuba. In the west, the Viñales Valley, a 132 km² karst basin in the Sierra de los Órganos, was listed in 1999 for its limestone towers and traditional tobacco farming.

Costa Rica’s richness comes from its position on the land bridge that joined North and South America three to five million years ago, letting the fauna of two continents mix. The country holds more than 500,000 species, nearly 5 percent of the world’s estimated total, on about one-thirtieth of one percent of Earth’s land. Thirty national parks run by the SINAC conservation system, together with other reserves, protect more than a quarter of the national territory. Corcovado on the Osa Peninsula is the one park where all four of the country’s monkey species live. Three of Costa Rica’s four UNESCO World Heritage Sites are natural: Talamanca Range–La Amistad (1983), Cocos Island (1997) and the Guanacaste Conservation Area (1999); the fourth, added in 2014, is the pre-Columbian chiefdom settlements with the stone spheres of the Diquís. Costa Rica was the first tropical country to halt and reverse deforestation, and about 95 percent of its electricity came from renewable sources in 2023.

Arenal, 1,633 m high and about 90 km northwest of San José, shows how young Costa Rica’s landscape is. It erupted without warning in 1968, burying the village of Tabacón, and kept erupting until 2010, one of the ten longest eruptions recorded since 1750. Cuba’s showpieces are instead karst valleys, caves and coral cays. For more on the island’s relief, see our guide to Cuba’s geography, and for the animals of the isthmus, our piece on wildlife in Costa Rica.

Cuba and Costa Rica: Broken Ties from 1961 to 2009

The two countries’ paths crossed directly in 1961. On 10 September that year, months after Fidel Castro declared Cuba a socialist state, Costa Rican President Mario Echandi broke off diplomatic relations by executive decree. The freeze lasted 47 years, until President Óscar Arias Sánchez restored normal relations on 18 March 2009, arguing that a country that had made peace with the Soviet Union could hardly refuse a neighbour so much nearer in geography and culture.

The contrast that freeze reflected still holds: a larger, older, poorer island under a single party, and a smaller, younger, wealthier mainland republic that settled its arguments at the ballot box after 1948. To see how San José’s institutions work in practice, from the presidency to the Supreme Court’s 22 judges, read our explainer on the government of Costa Rica.