The most famous people from Cuba are José Martí, the poet and independence leader whose verses became the song "Guantanamera"; Fidel Castro, who led the island from 1959 to 2011; the salsa singer Celia Cruz; the ballerina Alicia Alonso, founder of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba; José Raúl Capablanca, world chess champion from 1921 to 1927; Compay Segundo and Ibrahim Ferrer of the Buena Vista Social Club; the singer Gloria Estefan; and the high jumper Javier Sotomayor, who has held the world record of 2.45 metres since 1993. They fall into three groups: Cubans known around the world, Cubans every schoolchild on the island can name but few foreigners have heard of, and Cubans who made their names in Miami, Hollywood or London after leaving.
Martí, Castro, Capablanca and Alicia Alonso: Cubans the World Knows
José Martí (1853–1895) was born at 41 Paula Street in Havana to Spanish parents, a father from Valencia and a mother from the Canary Islands. Sentenced at 16 to six years in prison for opposing colonial rule, he was later sent to Spain and spent most of his adult life abroad as a journalist, poet and organiser, rallying Cuban exile communities in Tampa and Key West, founding the Cuban Revolutionary Party and editing its newspaper, Patria. He landed in Cuba with the rebels in 1895 and was killed at the Battle of Dos Ríos on 19 May that year, in the first weeks of the war that ended Spanish rule. Lines from his collection Versos Sencillos were later set to the tune of "Guantanamera", and his statue stands at the centre of Parque Central in Havana.
Fidel Castro (1926–2016) was born in Birán, in eastern Cuba, the son of a wealthy Spanish-born farmer, and studied law at the University of Havana. After a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba on 26 July 1953 and nearly two years in prison, he was amnestied in May 1955 and went to Mexico, where he organised his 26th of July Movement into an invasion force with his brother Raúl and the Argentine doctor Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Their guerrilla war drove President Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959. Castro served as prime minister from 1959 to 1976 and president from 1976 to 2008, turning Cuba into a one-party communist state; he handed his duties to Raúl in 2006 and remained first secretary of the Communist Party until 2011.
Two other Habaneros became world figures in quieter arts. José Raúl Capablanca (1888–1942), born in the Castillo del Príncipe fortress in Havana, was a chess prodigy who took the world championship from Emanuel Lasker in 1921 and went unbeaten in serious play from February 1916 to March 1924; he lost the title to Alexander Alekhine in 1927. Alicia Alonso (1920–2019), born on the outskirts of Havana, became a principal dancer with Ballet Theatre in New York in 1946 and was celebrated as Giselle, despite an eye condition that left her partially blind from the age of 19. The company she founded in Havana became the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in 1955, and she directed it for decades.
Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo: The Buena Vista Social Club Album of 1997
In March 1996 the American guitarist Ry Cooder, the producer Nick Gold and the bandleader Juan de Marcos González gathered about twenty veteran musicians at the EGREM studios in Havana, whose equipment had barely changed since the 1950s, and recorded fourteen tracks in six days. They named the project after a members' club in the Buenavista district of the city. Released in 1997, Buena Vista Social Club won the 1998 Grammy for Best Traditional Tropical Latin Album and had sold more than eight million copies by 2020. Wim Wenders's 1999 documentary about the musicians was nominated for an Academy Award.
Several of its members, some long retired, found an audience abroad in old age. Compay Segundo (1907–2003), born in Siboney near Santiago de Cuba, wrote "Chan Chan", the four-chord son that opens the album. Ibrahim Ferrer (1927–2005) had sung with the band Los Bocucos for nearly forty years before the project made him an international star in his seventies. Omara Portuondo (born 1930), a founder of the vocal group Cuarteto d'Aida in the 1950s, has been part of the Buena Vista project since 1996 and won Latin Grammys in 2009 and 2023.
Céspedes, Maceo, Finlay and Stevenson: Revered in Cuba, Less Known Abroad
Few visitors to Cuba arrive knowing these names, yet on the island they appear on banknotes, streets, schools and airports, and their anniversaries are marked on the calendar.
The Independence Generals
Carlos Manuel de Céspedes (1819–1874) was a lawyer and sugar planter who owned La Demajagua, an estate near Bayamo and Manzanillo in the east. On 10 October 1868 he rang the estate's bell, freed the enslaved people who worked there and declared Cuban independence in the Cry of Yara, starting the Ten Years' War. Cubans call him the Father of the Homeland. He was deposed as president of the rebel republic in 1873 and killed by Spanish troops in a mountain refuge in February 1874.
Antonio Maceo (1845–1896), born in San Luis near Santiago de Cuba, became second-in-command of the independence army and was nicknamed the Bronze Titan for surviving many wounds. In 1878 he refused to accept the peace that ended the Ten Years' War, a stand remembered as the Protest of Baraguá. He was killed near Punta Brava, west of Havana, on 7 December 1896.
A Doctor and Two Writers
Carlos Finlay (1833–1915), born in Camagüey to a Scottish father and French mother, proposed in 1881 that yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes. He was ridiculed at first; the Walter Reed Commission confirmed his theory in 1900, and he served as Cuba's chief health officer from 1902 to 1909. Nicolás Guillén (1902–1989), also from Camagüey, drew on the rhythms of son music in his first collection, Motivos de son (1930), and is remembered as the national poet. Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, to French and Russian parents but grew up in Havana and identified as Cuban all his life; his novel The Kingdom of This World (1949), about the Haitian Revolution, set out his idea of lo real maravilloso, the "marvellous real" of Latin American history, and he won the Cervantes Prize in 1977. The Havana novelist Leonardo Padura (born 1955), author of the Mario Conde detective series, won Spain's Princess of Asturias Award in 2015.
Athletes and a Cosmonaut
Teófilo Stevenson (1952–2012), from Puerto Padre, won the Olympic heavyweight boxing title in Munich in 1972, Montreal in 1976 and Moscow in 1980. He turned down a reported US$5 million offer from American promoters to fight Muhammad Ali, asking what a million dollars was compared with the love of eight million Cubans. Javier Sotomayor (born 1967), from Limonar in Matanzas province, became the first person to clear 8 feet in 1989 and set the current high jump world record of 2.45 metres in Salamanca, Spain, on 27 July 1993. He won Olympic gold at Barcelona in 1992. Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez (born 1942), from Baracoa in Guantánamo province, flew to the Salyut 6 space station on Soyuz 38 in September 1980, becoming the first Latin American and the first person of African descent in space.
Miami, Hollywood and London: Celia Cruz, Arnaz, Estefan and Other Cubans Abroad
Celia Cruz (1925–2003) was born at 47 Serrano Street in the Santos Suárez district of Havana, the daughter of a railway stoker. She rose to fame in the 1950s as lead singer of La Sonora Matancera, a partnership that lasted from 1950 to 1965. She left Cuba on 15 July 1960, after the revolution nationalised the music industry, worked first in Mexico and then settled in the United States, where she became known as the Queen of Salsa, sold over 30 million records and won two Grammys and three Latin Grammys. Her shout of "¡Azúcar!" became a trademark.
Desi Arnaz (1917–1986), born in Santiago de Cuba, led a Latin band in the United States and played Ricky Ricardo opposite his wife, Lucille Ball, in the sitcom I Love Lucy; the couple are credited with inventing the syndicated rerun. Gloria Estefan (born 1957) was born in Havana and became lead singer of the Miami Latin Boys, later renamed Miami Sound Machine; their 1985 single "Conga" was a worldwide hit, and she has won five Grammys and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Andy García (born 1956), born in Havana, moved to Miami with his family at the age of five after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. His role in The Godfather Part III (1990) made him the first Cuban-born actor nominated for an acting Oscar.
Not every exile went to Florida. Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929–2005), born in Gibara on the north coast, supported the revolution at first but went into exile in 1965 and settled in London. His novel Tres tristes tigres (Three Trapped Tigers) has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses, and he won the Cervantes Prize in 1997. The youngest name here, the singer Camila Cabello (born 1997), was born in Cojímar, a fishing village in eastern Havana, and later topped charts around the world with the single "Havana".
Many of these stories start in the same few streets, from Martí's birthplace to the Parque Central and the old studio where the Buena Vista musicians recorded; our guide to Old Havana covers the district, and Cuba's geography explains the eastern provinces where Céspedes, Maceo and Castro each began their wars.