The Caribbean’s largest island remains the lone non-Asian communist state
Cuba joins one main island to 4,195 lesser keys at the meeting of Caribbean, Gulf, and Atlantic waters east of Yucatán and south of Florida. Taíno and Guanahatabey peoples met Spanish colonization after Columbus claimed Isla Juana on 28 October 1492; today’s population mixes Indigenous, African, and European lineages.
By area Cuba is the biggest country in the Caribbean, and by population it ranks third behind Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It lies west of Hispaniola and north of Jamaica and the Caymans, with Havana as capital and largest city. People lived there from the fourth millennium BC. Modern Cubans descend mainly from Taíno and Ciboney natives, from Spanish settlers who came largely from Andalusia, Galicia, Asturias and the Canaries, and from Africans shipped in by the Atlantic slave trade.
Spain held the island until the war of 1898, after which American occupation preceded independence in 1902. A coup in 1933 ousted the elected president Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada and opened a long era of military sway, above all by Fulgencio Batista, and a new constitution followed in 1940. From the 1970s to the late 1980s Cuba backed anti-colonial and Marxist causes in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East; a declassified CIA estimate put Soviet aid at 33 billion dollars by 1984. The Soviet collapse brought the harsh downturn called the Special Period.
Fidel Castro stepped down in 2008 after 49 years and his brother Raúl took over. Miguel Díaz-Canel became president in 2018 and party first secretary in 2021, the first leader born after the revolution. The constitution enshrines the Communist Party, opposition is banned and Reporters Without Borders ranks the press climate among the world's worst. Havana calls the American base at Guantánamo Bay illegal and has kept minefields on its side of the fence since 1961.
The command economy leans on tourism, sugar, tobacco, coffee and the export of skilled workers. Literacy has long beaten regional averages, and after 1959 infant and maternal mortality and life expectancy did too. A 2012 study found Cuba the only nation meeting WWF criteria for sustainable development. Healthcare is free, though doctors are poorly paid and drugs often run short.
Source: Cuba
