Cuba

Cuba is an island country.

It is long and thin. Warm sea is all around it. The capital city is called Havana.

Cuba is a country made of islands in the Caribbean. The main island is by far the largest island in the West Indies: about 1,250 kilometers long but only 31 to 191 kilometers wide. Around it lie about 1,600 smaller islands, islets and cays.

Cuba lies just south of the Tropic of Cancer, where the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea meet. It is warm all year. Havana, the capital, is by far the largest city. About 9.4 million people lived in Cuba at the end of 2025, and Spanish is the main language.

Cuba sits just south of the Tropic of Cancer at the meeting of the Atlantic Ocean (north and east), the Gulf of Mexico (west) and the Caribbean Sea (south). It is an archipelago of about 1,600 islands, islets and cays with a combined area about three-fourths that of Florida; the main island, one of the four Greater Antilles, is 1,250 km long and 31 to 191 km wide, and Isla de la Juventud is the second largest.

Britannica describes Cuba as a multicultural, largely urban nation with only one major city, Havana, the capital and commercial hub on the northwestern coast. Its official name is the Republic of Cuba, and it is a socialist republic with one legislative house. Cuba’s national statistics office (ONEI) counted 9,434,593 people at the end of 2025; the population has been falling as many people emigrate.

Havana is an old city by the sea.

It has colorful buildings and big stone forts. Santiago has a stone castle on a cliff. Camagüey has red tile roofs.

Havana was founded by the Spanish in about 1519 and became one of the Caribbean's main shipbuilding centers. Its old center, with five big plazas, houses with balconies and some of the oldest and largest stone forts in the Americas, is a World Heritage Site.

Santiago de Cuba, in the southeast, is the second largest city. Since 1638 the stone fortress of San Pedro de la Roca has guarded the entrance to its bay. Camagüey, Trinidad and other cities also have old Spanish colonial buildings, and in the west, steep, plant-covered hills called mogotes rise from the Viñales Valley.

Old Havana, founded about 1519 on the northwestern shore, keeps its original layout of five large plazas, among them the Plaza de Armas and Plaza de la Catedral, with baroque and neoclassical monuments and houses with arcades, balconies, wrought-iron gates and courtyards. UNESCO calls it the most impressive historic city center in the Caribbean; its 16th- to 19th-century fortifications, including La Cabaña, Real Fuerza, Morro and La Punta, are among the oldest and largest stone forts in the Americas.

Santiago de Cuba, the second city, is guarded by San Pedro de la Roca Castle (from 1638), designed after the Italian engineer Giovanni Battista Antonelli and described by UNESCO as the most complete example of Spanish-American military architecture. One in five Cubans lives in Havana, more than in the next 11 cities combined. Viñales and the Desembarco del Granma National Park were both inscribed by UNESCO in 1999.

Cuba is warm all year.

It has a rainy season and a dry season. Strong storms called hurricanes sometimes come. Tall palm trees grow all over the countryside.

Plains cover about two-thirds of Cuba's main island, and mountains and hills cover about one-fourth. The highest peak, Turquino, rises to 1,974 meters in the Sierra Maestra along the southeast coast. In the west, the Viñales Valley is dotted with mogotes, steep, plant-covered hills with rounded tops, and the Cave of Santo Tomás runs for about 26 kilometers underground.

Cuba's average temperature is about 26 °C. The dry season runs from November to April and the rainy season from May to October, and from June to November hurricanes can bring strong winds and heavy rain. The royal palm, up to 23 meters tall, is the national tree.

Mountains and hills cover about a quarter of the main island: the Sierra Maestra, about 240 km along the southeast coast, reaches 1,974 m at Turquino Peak; the Cordillera de Guaniguanico in the far west includes the Sierra de los Órganos; and much of central-western Cuba is punctuated by mogotes, steep vegetation-clad hillocks. Plains cover about two-thirds, used for sugarcane, tobacco and livestock. The irregular 5,745 km coastline has bays, beaches, mangroves, coral reefs and cliffs, and the Zapata Swamp is the largest wetland. The Cauto, 370 km, is the longest river.

The climate is tropical, shaped by northeast trade winds and the warm Gulf Stream: the annual mean is 26 °C (23 °C in January, 28 °C in August), rain averages 1,380 mm, falling mostly May to October, and hurricanes threaten from June to November. Much original forest gave way to sugarcane, coffee and rice, but replanting since the 1960s has brought forest cover back to about a quarter of the land.

The tiniest bird in the world lives in Cuba.

It is called the bee hummingbird. Pink flamingos live there too. Manatees swim where rivers meet the sea.

Cuba is home to the bee hummingbird, the smallest living bird, which weighs only about 2 grams. About 300 kinds of birds are found in Cuba, including flamingos, and about two-thirds of them are migrants. The national bird, the tocororo, has red, white and blue feathers, the colors of the Cuban flag.

Cuba also has manatees at river mouths, two kinds of rare crocodiles in its marshes, iguanas, and the majá de Santa María, its largest snake; none of Cuba's snakes is venomous. In the remote east lives the solenodon, a rare insect-eating mammal.

Britannica counts more than 7,000 insect species, 4,000 species of mollusks, more than 500 fish species and about 300 bird species in Cuba, two-thirds of the birds migratory. The endemic tocororo (Priotelus temnurus), the national bird, has red, white and blue plumage matching the flag. The bee hummingbird (Mellisuga helenae) of Cuba and the Isle of Pines, slightly more than 5.5 cm long and about 2 g, is the smallest living bird.

The marshes hold two rare crocodile species, and land reptiles include iguanas and the majá de Santa María (Epicrates angulifer), the largest of Cuba's snakes, none of which is venomous. There are 60 kinds of frogs and toads. The solenodon (Atopogale cubana), a nearly extinct insectivore, survives only in the remotest east; hutias and manatees are other native mammals. Thousands of flowering plants grow in Cuba, perhaps half of them found nowhere else, including the rare cork palm, a cycad genus thought to be more than 100 million years old.

About 9.4 million people live in Cuba.

They speak Spanish. Many Cubans have families from Spain or Africa. African traditions helped shape Cuban music and dance.

Cuba's people have ancestors from many places, mainly Spain and Africa, and also China and Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Spanish is the main language; words and rhythms from Africa have shaped the way Cubans speak, and the word hamaca, hammock, comes from Cuba's first peoples and passed into other languages.

About three-fourths of Cubans live in towns and cities, and one in five lives in Havana. People whose ancestors came from Africa have had a great influence on Cuban music and dance.

Britannica estimates that about two-thirds of Cubans descend mainly from Spaniards, about one-fourth are of mixed ancestry and about one-tenth are Black; Chinese laborers (about 125,000 in 1847–74) and later immigrants added smaller communities. Spanish is the principal language, enriched by African vocabulary and intonation, with a few Taino words such as hamaca. Between two-fifths and one-half of people are at least nominally Roman Catholic, about one-fifth are nonreligious, and many follow Santería, which has West African roots; Christmas was restored as a national holiday in 1997.

Three-fourths of people lived in towns and cities by the early 21st century, and one in five lived in Havana. Britannica notes that daily life is challenging, with limited access to food, transportation and electric power. Black and mixed-heritage Cubans have strongly shaped the country's music and dance.