🇨🇺 Cuba

Arawakan-speaking ancestors of the Taíno reached the Caribbean from South America and largely replaced earlier pre-ceramic populations with almost no genetic admixture. The Taíno produced pottery and practised intensive agriculture, and their tobacco smoking later spread globally through the Columbian exchange. Descendants of the earlier settlers survived in western Cuba as the Guanahatabey until Columbian contact.

Columbus arrived off Cuba on 27 October 1492 during his first voyage and landed the following day, claiming the island for the Kingdom of Spain. The claim opened four centuries of Spanish sovereignty that shaped Cuba's language, religion and economic role within the empire.

As a Spanish colony Cuba imported large numbers of African slaves to work its coffee and sugar plantations, while Havana became the launching point for the annual treasure fleets bound for Spain from Mexico and Peru.

The 1511 settlement began systematic Spanish colonisation of Cuba, followed by further towns. Indigenous Taíno were forced to labour under the encomienda system, a structure resembling European feudalism.

Havana was first established in 1514 on the southern coast and moved to its present site in 1519. It became the capital in 1607 and the administrative and maritime hub of Spain's Caribbean empire.

Within a century of contact, Eurasian infectious diseases combined with harsh colonial subjugation destroyed the Taíno population. The 1529 measles epidemic killed two-thirds of those who had already survived smallpox, effectively ending indigenous society as a demographic force.

On 18 May 1539 the conquistador sailed from Havana with some 600 followers in search of gold and fame. The voyage underlined Havana's emerging role as a staging base for Spanish exploration of the mainland.

Appointed governor on 1 September 1548, he arrived at Santiago de Cuba in November 1549 and proclaimed the freedom of the indigenous population. Residing in Havana, he built the first masonry church on the island and established permanent civil administration.

By 1570 most residents of Cuba had mixed heritage, and the colony developed as an urbanised society supporting the Spanish empire rather than a plantation monoculture. Diversified agriculture with small farms distinguished Cuba from other Caribbean islands.

Between 1790 and 1820 some 325,000 Africans were brought to Cuba as slaves, four times the number arriving between 1760 and 1790. The surge transformed the island's labour system and demography and tied its economy to sugar for the empire.

The 1812 rising was suppressed by colonial authorities. It marked one of the most significant challenges to slavery in Cuba before abolition, in a society where enslaved people made up a growing share of the population.

As Spain's mainland Latin American empire broke apart into independent states, Cuba stayed within the empire because its economy was built on serving it. This delayed Cuban independence by decades and left the island as one of Spain's last colonies.

Spanish rule eventually provoked an independence movement and occasional rebellions — from the Ten Years' War of 1868–78 to José Martí's 1895 rising — that were harshly suppressed.

The sugar planter freed his slaves to fight for independence and on 27 December 1868 issued a decree condemning slavery while freeing slaves presented for military service. The rising drew Dominican officers and foreign volunteers but lacked support from wealthy planters and most slaves, and racial and regional divisions contributed to the Liberation Army's defeat.

Slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1875 and fully wound up by 1886, ending a system that had underpinned the sugar economy. The practice of coartación, buying oneself out of slavery, had already been a distinctive Cuban development.

The 1878 pact concluded the prolonged conflict, with Spain promising Cuba greater autonomy. The settlement left independence unachieved and set the stage for renewed insurgency.

The Cuban patriot tried to start a new war of independence but failed to gather sufficient support. The failure showed the exhaustion of the independence movement after the Ten Years' War.

The Spanish military governor confined the rural population in fortified towns, often considered a prototype for 20th-century concentration camps. Between 200,000 and 400,000 civilians died of starvation and disease, provoking American and European protest.

The exiled dissident created the party in 1892 to achieve independence from Spain. It provided the organisational and ideological base for the final war of independence.

Fighting against the Spanish army began on 24 February 1895; Martí arrived in April and was killed at the Battle of Dos Ríos on 19 May, becoming Cuba's national hero. The much smaller rebel army relied on guerrilla and sabotage tactics against some 200,000 Spanish troops.

Spain relinquished Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States for US$20 million, with Cuban revolutionaries excluded from the peace conference. On 1 January 1899 Havana was surrendered to General John R. Brooke, ending 400 years of Spanish rule.

The US battleship Maine exploded in Havana Harbour, killing nearly three-quarters of the crew; the cause was never established, but the American yellow press blamed Spain. War was declared in late April 1898, internationalising the Cuban independence struggle.

The destruction of Cuban farms and plantations in the war facilitated the transfer of property to American ownership. Americans invested $50 million, mainly in sugar and tobacco plantations and mining, entrenching US economic dominance of the island.

US military government ended on 20 May 1902 and the Republic of Cuba was proclaimed after four years of US occupation following the Spanish-American War. Under the new constitution and the Platt Amendment the United States retained the right to intervene in Cuban affairs, supervise its finances and foreign relations, and secured the lease of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base.

Disputed elections in 1906 provoked an armed revolt by independence war veterans that defeated government forces under President Tomás Estrada Palma. The US intervened and governed for three years through Magoon, whose administration Cuban historians blame for entrenching political and social corruption.

Cuban self-rule resumed in 1908 after the American occupation, though the United States continued to intervene in Cuban affairs. The pattern of limited sovereignty persisted through the early republic.

The party attempted to establish a separate black republic in Oriente Province and was crushed with considerable bloodshed. The episode entrenched racial exclusion in republican politics.

American-owned hotels and restaurants were built to accommodate a marked influx of tourists during Machado's administration. The boom also drove increases in gambling and prostitution, shaping Cuba's mid-century image.

The 1929 crash caused sugar prices to collapse, bringing political unrest and repression. Student protests by the Generation of 1930, a general strike, sugar worker uprisings and an army revolt forced Machado into exile in August 1933.

The coup toppled the government of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada and installed the five-member Pentarchy of 1933, with Ramón Grau San Martín as provisional president. After Grau resigned in 1934 Batista dominated Cuban politics for 25 years, initially through puppet presidents, in a period of virtually unremitting social and political warfare.

Cuban armed forces saw little combat, though the country lost six merchant ships and the navy was credited with sinking a German submarine. Batista even proposed a joint US–Latin American assault on Francoist Spain.

The constitution enshrined rights to labour and health care, and Batista was elected president the same year, serving until 1944 and carrying out major social reforms. Several Communist Party members held office under his administration, and he respected the constitutional bar on re-election.

Grau was re-elected in 1944 and Carlos Prío Socarrás became president in 1948. Their two terms brought an influx of investment that raised living standards across society and created an urban middle class, though Grau undermined Congress and the Supreme Court.

Facing electoral defeat, Batista pre-empted the election with a military coup, suspended the 1940 constitution and revoked most political liberties including the right to strike. Backed financially and militarily by the United States, he outlawed the Communist Party, aligned with large sugar landowners and presided over a stagnating economy that widened inequality.

Castro and about 80 supporters disembarked in 1956 in an attempt to overthrow Batista. By 1958 his 26th of July Movement had emerged as the leading revolutionary group, and the United States imposed an arms embargo on Batista's government.

Militant anti-Castro groups carried out armed attacks and established guerrilla bases in Cuba's mountainous regions. The unsuccessful insurgency lasted longer and involved more soldiers than the Cuban Revolution itself.

The law expropriated thousands of acres of farmland, including from large American landowners, sharply worsening relations with Washington. Together with the legalisation of the Communist Party and mass executions of Batista agents, it ended initial US goodwill towards the revolution.

After the revolution the government offered free education to all and established rigorous sports, ballet and music programmes. Literacy had ranked only fourth in Latin America at 76% in 1957.

After rebel forces captured Santa Clara, Batista fled to the Dominican Republic on 1 January 1959 as rebel columns entered Havana and Santiago de Cuba, with Castro's fighters reaching Havana on 8 January and the liberal Manuel Urrutia Lleó installed as provisional president. Before the revolution foreign investors controlled 75% of arable land, 90% of essential services and 40% of sugar production; economic independence was a central revolutionary goal, and the new government soon nationalised major industries and aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union.

Cuba's communist revolution, backed by the Soviet Union, was exported throughout Latin America and Africa during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, including interventions in Angola and Ethiopia. The United States imposed its trade embargo on the island in 1961.

Following an internal memo of 6 April 1960 arguing that economic hardship would provoke the government's overthrow, President Eisenhower banned all exports to Cuba except medicines and certain foods. Extended in 1962 to imports under the Foreign Assistance Act, the embargo has run for more than six decades and remains one of the longest-running bilateral economic measures in history.

Castro concluded the deal with Soviet Vice-Premier Anastas Mikoyan, beginning Cuba's realignment towards Moscow. Cuba would become heavily dependent on Soviet subsidies and COMECON aid, receiving $33 billion by 1984.

Both sides mined opposite sides of the Guantánamo Bay perimeter in 1961. Cuba has regarded the US base as illegal since 1959 and has maintained its minefields ever since.

To prevent mass emigration after the revolution, the government required an expensive exit permit and letter of invitation for travel abroad, granting exit visas only rarely. The system remained in force until it was abolished in 2013.

About 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles of Brigade 2506 landed at the Bay of Pigs on 17 April after preemptive airstrikes on Cuban airfields, and were defeated by 19 April with over 100 killed and the rest captured. The victory consolidated the revolutionary government and contributed to the Soviet decision to deploy missiles to Cuba.

The OAS suspended Cuban membership and adopted sanctions similar to those of the United States. The measures isolated Cuba in the hemisphere until the OAS lifted its sanctions in 1975 and ended the membership ban in 2009.

Soviet R-12 missiles deployed to Cuba triggered a confrontation widely considered the closest the world has come to nuclear war; it began in October after American reconnaissance found the missile sites under construction. A US naval quarantine and secret diplomacy led to the missiles' withdrawal within weeks in exchange for a private US pledge not to invade the island — a settlement reached without Cuban participation.

Cuban forces with armour, artillery and anti-aircraft units deployed to Oran to support Algeria against Morocco, which agreed to a ceasefire on 29 October before the planned Cuban counterattack. Cuban forces remained over a year training the Algerian army, inaugurating decades of overseas military intervention.

Figures released on 7 August showed just 387,591 visitors arrived between January and June, extending a multi-year decline. Fuel shortages, flight suspensions by foreign carriers and the wider economic crisis were cited as factors.

The 8 August measure widened fiscal benefits previously limited to state enterprises, as the island pushed to diversify a power grid crippled by years of fuel shortages.

The New York Times report on 8 August came a day after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Cuba had no escape valves left from US pressure. Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Josefina Vidal said the remarks amounted to a threat against the nation's existence.

The 5 June measure marked the first time Washington had sanctioned Cuba's first secretary personally, extending a wider campaign against Cuban officials and state-linked entities that had gathered pace through 2026.

The 18 June measures increased autonomy for municipalities and state companies and set out steps to attract foreign investment. They followed months of fuel shortages and blackouts that had deepened the island's economic crisis.

The pardons, announced on 2 April around the Easter holiday, were described by authorities as a humanitarian gesture and were to be carried out in stages based on inmates' conduct and health.

Following the US intervention in Venezuela, a major oil supplier to Cuba, and expanded American sanctions, Cuba suffered widespread energy shortages with rolling blackouts, hospital shortages and flight cancellations. UN experts condemned the executive order imposing a fuel blockade as a serious violation of international law.

The 25 February incident, which also left six passengers injured, occurred during a confrontation at sea. It added to tensions between Havana and Washington amid the wider stand-off over US sanctions.

The 3 January measure followed Cuba's involvement in the aftermath of US strikes in Venezuela and triggered months of fuel shortages, blackouts and diplomatic rupture across the region. Mexico and other governments later suspended their own fuel shipments to the island.

Gil, who had been dismissed from the government and expelled from the Communist Party in 2024 amid corruption allegations, was convicted on 8 December of spying against the Cuban state.

Ferrer's release on 13 October followed a request from the US government, months after his parole from an earlier sentence had been revoked. He had been a longtime critic of the Cuban government and its human-rights record.

Under the pact Cuba upgraded its S-125 Pechora air defence systems with Belarusian support. It still lacks a modern networked air defence system, having cut military personnel from 235,000 in 1994 to about 49,000 in 2021.

The blackouts were described as the most severe living crisis since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Díaz-Canel blamed the US embargo for preventing supplies and replacement parts from reaching the island.

The 2022 vote amended the Family Code to permit same-sex marriage, surrogate pregnancy and same-sex adoption. It reversed decades of official hostility towards homosexuality that had persisted from 1959 until the 1990s.

Attempted entries to the US, mainly via the Mexican border, rose from 39,000 in 2021 to over 224,000 in 2022, with almost 250,000 Cubans — over 2% of the population — migrating in a single year. The exodus exceeded the 1980 Mariel boatlift and the 1994 rafter crisis combined, and the national population fell below 10 million in 2025, a 13% loss since the 2012 peak.

Several large protests broke out across the island from 11 July 2021 against chronic shortages and the government's handling of the economy, the largest since the 1959 revolution, spreading to dozens of towns and cities and fuelled by the internet and social media access available since 2018, with parallel demonstrations by exiles abroad. Police promptly suppressed the protests and authorities arrested hundreds of participants, including prominent artists and bloggers, blaming the unrest on foreign interference.

On 19 April 2021 Díaz-Canel succeeded Raúl Castro as party leader, becoming the first non-Castro in the top position since 1959 and the first Cuban leader born after the revolution. The change completed the generational transition at the head of the state and party.

On 1 January 2021 the convertible peso (CUC) was phased out, leaving the CUP as sole currency, with citizens given until June to exchange holdings. The long-promised unification, announced by Raúl Castro in 2013, was accompanied by large wage rises but triggered inflation that worsened food scarcity and boosted the black market.

The designation reimposed a series of additional economic sanctions on Cuba, reversing the 2015 removal. It compounded the economic crisis and contributed to record emigration.

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic cut tourist numbers by three-quarters, devastating a sector that had drawn 2,688,000 international visitors in 2011. Remittances also fell from US$6,616 million in 2019 to US$1,967 million in 2020.

Chicken, eggs, rice, beans, soap and other basic goods were rationed in May 2019 amid worsening shortages. In June the government announced public sector wage increases of about 300% for teachers and health personnel.

With 84.4% turnout in an optional vote, 90% approved the text. It retains the Communist Party as the only legitimate party while imposing presidential term limits, recognising private property, enshrining legal representation on arrest, banning discrimination and strengthening rights for multinationals investing with the state.

Following parliamentary elections and Raúl Castro's resignation, the National Assembly elected Díaz-Canel on 18 April 2018. Raúl remained First Secretary of the Communist Party with broad authority, including oversight of the president, until 2021.

After ETECSA opened 118 cybercafés in 2013, mobile internet became available from 2018, with 7.1 million Cubans online in 2019 and 8.19 million by 2024. Widespread connectivity fuelled calls for political and economic liberalisation and enabled the 2021 protests.

The hurricane hit the Camagüey Archipelago on 8 September 2017. It was among the most powerful storms to make landfall on Cuba in recent decades.

Cuba joined the treaty in 2017, consistent with its long-standing opposition to nuclear arms since the 1962 crisis. Its own defence spending had fallen to about US$91.8 million, 2.9% of GDP, by 2018, from over 10% of GDP in 1985.

Castro, who had led Cuba from the 1959 revolution until handing power to his brother Raúl in 2006, died on 25 November. Cuba declared nine days of official mourning, and reactions abroad ranged from tribute to condemnation.

The World Health Organization hailed the elimination of mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis as one of the greatest public health achievements possible. It reinforced Cuba's international reputation in medicine, alongside some 50,000 Cuban-trained health workers aiding 66 nations in 2014.

After secret talks brokered in part by Canada and Pope Francis, Presidents Raúl Castro and Barack Obama made simultaneous announcements on 17 December 2014. The deal included the release of Alan Gross, 52 political prisoners and a US agent in return for three convicted Cuban spies, and a relaxation of the embargo to allow limited commerce. Embassies reopened in Havana and Washington in 2015, ending more than five decades without formal ties, and the United States removed Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.

From 13 January 2013 Cubans no longer needed an expensive government permit and letter of invitation to travel abroad, ending restrictions imposed in 1961. Over 180,000 people left and returned in the programme's first year.

Illicit migration to the US — by homemade raft, smuggler, air flight or via the US south-west border — remains a continuing problem. In 2013 the US Coast Guard interdicted 1,357 Cubans in the Straits of Florida, while 14,251 Cuban migrants presented themselves at US land border ports of entry.

Cubans were allowed to build their own houses in 2010, and in August 2011 the government reaffirmed its intent to legalise the buying and selling of private property. The measures were part of market reforms that led observers to describe the economy as moving toward market socialism.

Fidel resigned as President of the State Council due to illness and the National Assembly elected his brother on 24 February 2008. Raúl promised to remove some restrictions on freedom, removed several of his brother's appointees in March 2009 and began agrarian reforms to boost food production, as 80% of food was then imported.

Population growth slowed after 1961 and turned negative in 2006, driven by a fertility rate of 1.43 children per woman and sustained emigration. The 2010 census recorded 11,241,161 inhabitants, and the birth rate is among the lowest in the Western Hemisphere.

A large number of civil activists were arrested and imprisoned in 2003. The crackdown damaged Cuba's international standing, particularly with the European Union, which resumed full relations only in 2008.

The Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act followed Cuba's shooting down of two small aircraft flown by a Florida-based anti-Castro group. It codified and tightened the embargo, which the UN General Assembly has condemned annually since 1992.

Under the agreement of 9 September 1994, the US would grant at least 20,000 visas annually in exchange for Cuba preventing unlawful departures by boat. It followed the rafter crisis and the dispersal of a spontaneous Havana protest by state security on 5 August 1994.

Religious freedom had been increasing through the 1980s, and the 1992 amendment removed the state's self-description as atheistic. Relaxation of restrictions on house churches in the 1990s produced an explosion of Pentecostalism, and popes visited in 1998, 2011 and 2015.

Cuba joined the CBD in 1992 and submitted a National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan in 2008. The plan catalogued the island's species, including 17,801 animals and 9,107 plants.

Soviet troops began withdrawing in September 1991 and the USSR dissolved that December, ending subsidised trade and aid worth $4–6 billion a year and causing acute shortages of food, fuel and medicine through the 1990s. GDP shrank by 35% by 1995 and took another five years to recover pre-crisis levels; the government refused American food, medicine and cash donations until 1993, while introducing limited market reforms, including legalising the US dollar and small-scale private enterprise, to ease the crisis.

After the coup that killed Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, US troops overthrew the pro-Castro government in Grenada. Some 6,000 American troops defeated 784 Cubans, mostly construction workers with military training, checking Cuban influence in the Caribbean.

Cuba sent combat troops from Angola, the Congo and the Caribbean to Ethiopia in December 1977; a counterattack on 24 January 1978 inflicted 3,000 casualties and a February offensive of 10,000–12,000 troops drove the Somali army back by 9 March. Somalia had broken relations with Cuba on 13 November 1977, and Cuban forces remained in Ethiopia until September 1989.

The constitution, approved in February, formally established the Communist Party's leading role in the state and created the National Assembly of People's Power. It remained in force, with amendments, until a further constitution was adopted in 2019.

In one of the fastest military mobilisations in history, Cuban forces intervened alongside the MPLA against UNITA and apartheid South African forces, fighting again at Cuito Cuanavale in 1988. The Cuban presence prompted South Africa's nuclear weapons programme, and troops were gradually withdrawn in 1989–91.

A major mission of tank, air and artillery specialists went to South Yemen in 1972, advisors were sent to Iraq in the mid-1970s until the 1980 invasion of Iran, and Cuban armour was reported on the Golan front in 1973–74. Soviet aircraft airlifted 1,000 Cuban troops to South Yemen in June 1978 and 1,500 more in March 1979.

From 1968 some 58,000 remaining private small businesses were nationalised and the economy was refocused on sugar, with a target of 10 million tons by 1970. Mass mobilisation of labour to the countryside militarised society, the harvest goal was missed and neglected sectors sent the economy into decline; Castro admitted the failures in a 1970 speech.

Authorised by Castro, Guevara had conducted guerrilla activities in Africa before moving to Bolivia, where he was killed in 1967. His death marked the limits of Cuban efforts to export revolution to Latin America.

The 1966 coup collapsed when the Congolese army refused to fight the Cuban contingent. Cuba also armed the MPLA in Angola, aided the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau and trained FRELIMO fighters, with a Cuban captain captured by Portuguese troops in November 1969.