Cuba is the largest country in the Caribbean, with an official area of 109,884 km², and its main island is 1,250 km long. It has 4,195 smaller islands, islets and cays. Its highest point, Pico Turquino, rises to 1,974 m. It is home to the world’s smallest bird, the bee hummingbird, males of which are 5.5 cm long. Havana, its capital, was founded on its present site in 1519. Cuba was the centre of the 13-day Missile Crisis of October 1962, and the United States has held Guantánamo Bay under a lease since 1903, which the Cuban government has called illegal since 1959. Its population is also falling quickly: the island had nearly 11.2 million people at the 2012 census but about 9.43 million in 2025.
109,884 km²: The Largest Island Nation in the Caribbean
Cuba lies where the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic meet, south of Florida and the Bahamas, east of the Yucatán Peninsula and west of Hispaniola. The main island alone covers 104,338 km², making it the largest island in the Caribbean and the 17th-largest in the world. It is long and narrow, stretching 1,250 km from west to east. Four groups of smaller islands surround it: the Colorados Archipelago in the northwest, the Sabana-Camagüey Archipelago along the north-central coast, the Jardines de la Reina in the south, and the Canarreos Archipelago in the southwest. The Canarreos include the second-largest Cuban island, Isla de la Juventud, at 2,204 km².
Hispaniola, the only Caribbean island close to Cuba in size, is split between two countries, so Cuba is the largest Caribbean country by a wide margin. By population, however, it ranks only third in the region, behind Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Our Cuba vs Dominican Republic comparison sets the two side by side.
1,974 Metres: Pico Turquino and the Sierra Maestra
Most of the main island is flat or gently rolling plain. The big exception is the southeast, where the Sierra Maestra rises steeply from the Caribbean coast. Its highest summit, Pico Turquino, at 1,974 m (6,476 ft), is the highest point in Cuba. The range’s remoteness also gave it a place in history. Fidel Castro’s rebels used the Sierra Maestra as their base, and they did not break out of the mountains into the rest of the island until late 1958.
At the other end of the island, the Viñales Valley in Pinar del Río Province is a karst depression of 132 km² whose floor is broken by steep-sided limestone hills called mogotes, some up to 300 m tall. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1999 for its landscape and for the traditional methods still used to grow tobacco on the valley floor.
55 Millimetres: The World’s Smallest Bird
The bee hummingbird, called zunzuncito in Cuba, is endemic to the Cuban archipelago, including the main island and Isla de la Juventud, and is the smallest living bird. Males average 5.5 cm long and weigh about 1.95 g. Females are slightly bigger, at 6.1 cm and 2.6 g. They feed on flower nectar and small insects.
It is not the island’s only endemic species. The Cuban trogon, or tocororo, the national bird, is endemic too. (The national flower, the white mariposa, Hedychium coronarium, is native to Asia, not Cuba.) Other endemic animals include the Cuban crocodile, the Cuban hutia, the Cuban solenodon, the Cuban gar, the Cuban boa and the painted land snail Polymita picta.
1492 and 1519: Columbus, Baracoa and Havana
Christopher Columbus reached Cuba on 27 October 1492, landed the next day, and named it Isla Juana after Prince John of Asturias. People had first settled the island about 6,000 years ago. By 1492 the Taíno, whose Arawakan-speaking ancestors had reached the Caribbean from South America around 1,700 years ago, were living there alongside the Guanahatabey, descendants of the first settlers. Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar founded the first Spanish settlement at Baracoa in 1511. The Taíno were forced to work under the encomienda system, and their numbers collapsed, mainly from Eurasian diseases they had no immunity to, made worse by harsh colonial rule. In 1529 a measles outbreak killed two-thirds of those who had survived smallpox. Taíno ancestry persists in modern Cubans, as mitochondrial DNA studies show.
San Cristóbal de la Habana was first founded on the south coast in 1514 and moved to its present harbour on the north coast in 1519. Its sheltered harbour meant that by the mid-16th century it had overtaken Santiago de Cuba, and in 1539 Hernando de Soto left Havana with about 600 followers to explore what is now the southeastern United States. Old Havana was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1982. Our guide to Old Havana’s World Heritage site walks through its plazas and fortresses.
7.1 Million Tonnes to 300,000: Cuban Sugar
For most of its colonial and modern history, sugar shaped Cuba’s economy and its people. The industry depended on enslaved Africans. In 1841, of 1,007,624 people on the island, 425,521 were enslaved Black people. Cuba produced 55,000 tons of sugar in 1820, almost one million tons in 1895 and more than five million tons in 1925, when the whole world produced 25 million tons.
After the revolution, the Soviet Union became Cuba’s key buyer. A 1964 agreement committed Moscow to buy 24 million tons between 1965 and 1970 at a fixed price. Fidel Castro’s government set a target of a 10-million-ton harvest in 1970 and moved workers from every sector into the cane fields, but Cuba fell short. When the Soviet Union broke up, production fell from 7.1 million tons in 1991 to 4.4 million in 1993. By 2024 it had fallen to a record low of 300,000 tonnes. Nickel has taken over part of sugar’s role. It made up 21% of exports in 2011, when Cuban mines produced 71,000 tons, close to 4% of world output, and in 2013 the country’s reserves were estimated at 5.5 million tons, more than 7% of the world total.
13 Days in October 1962
Cuba became formally independent on 20 May 1902, after the Spanish–American War. The Platt Amendment, however, let the United States intervene in its affairs, and in 1903 the US leased Guantánamo Bay. The base covers about 117 km² of land and water. The lease has no fixed expiry date. The United States paid $2,000 a year in gold until 1934, when the rent was tied to the price of gold, and since 1974 it has sent $4,085 a year, about $98,000 in 2025 money. Cuba has accepted only one of these payments since the revolution and regards the base as illegal.
Fulgencio Batista fled on 1 January 1959, and Fidel Castro’s forces entered Havana a week later. The US embargo began in 1960, after nationalisations of American-owned property worth more than US$1 billion, and it is one of the longest-running trade measures between two countries. In April 1961 the CIA-backed Brigade 2506 invaded at the Bay of Pigs and was defeated. The Cuban Missile Crisis followed from 16 to 28 October 1962. The United States had placed nuclear missiles in Britain, Italy and Turkey, and the Soviet Union answered by placing missiles in Cuba. The 13-day standoff is widely seen as the closest the Cold War came to full nuclear war.
100,000 Young Teachers: The 1961 Literacy Campaign
In 1957, Cuba’s literacy rate was about 76%, fourth in Latin America according to the United Nations. Illiteracy was 11% in the cities but 41.7% in the countryside. In 1961, declared the “Year of Education”, the revolutionary government sent about 100,000 volunteers aged 10 to 19, the Conrado Benítez brigades, to live with rural families and teach them to read. Regular schooling was replaced by alternative classes for eight months of the 1961 school year, and about one million Cubans took part as teachers or learners.
Health care followed a similar pattern. Cuba had 9.2 doctors per 10,000 people in 1958 and 58.2 per 10,000 by 1999. Doctors also became an export: in 2014 about 50,000 Cuban-trained health workers were working in 66 countries, with as many as 30,000 doctors in Venezuela alone under an oil-for-doctors programme.
Cuba’s Olympic record started long before the revolution. At its first Games in 1900, fencer Ramón Fonst won the amateur épée, and he won it again in 1904. Cuba has never competed at a Winter Olympics, yet it has won more Olympic medals than any other Latin American country and ranks second in the Americas for Summer gold medals, behind only the United States. Among countries that have never hosted the Games, only Hungary, Romania and Poland have won more medals.
From 11.2 Million to 9.4 Million People
Cuba’s population is shrinking fast. The decline began to decline in 2006, and the September 2012 census, the most recent, counted nearly 11.2 million. The national statistics office, ONEI, then estimated 9,748,007 people in 2024 and 9,434,593 in 2025. Low fertility explains part of the fall, at 1.43 children per woman. Emigration is the other cause. In 2022, almost 250,000 Cubans, more than 2% of the population, migrated to the United States, and attempts to enter the United States through the Mexican border rose from 39,000 in 2021 to over 224,000 in 2022. The worst economic crisis since the Soviet collapse, including the 2024–2026 blackouts, has kept many people leaving. Our article on the population of Cuba looks at those numbers in more detail.