Cubans (Spanish: cubanos) are the citizens and nationals of the Republic of Cuba, as well as members of the Cuban diaspora who identify culturally or ethnically as Cuban, irrespective of their current citizenship.
Cuba's resident population stood at approximately 9.7 million at the end of 2024, according to preliminary figures released by the Oficina Nacional de Estadística e Información (ONEI). According to the ONEI, the country's population has been undergoing a sustained decline driven by the combined effect of significant emigration and a negative rate of natural increase. Independent demographic analyses suggest that the actual resident population may be lower than official figures indicate, owing in part to an underestimation of emigration to destinations other than the United States.
Outside the island, the United States hosts by far the largest Cuban community, estimated at 2.9 million people of Cuban origin in 2024, concentrated primarily in Florida—notably in the Miami metropolitan area—as well as in Texas, California, New Jersey, and New York City. Spain constitutes the second-largest Cuban diaspora community, with smaller populations present in Brazil, Italy, and Uruguay.
The population of Cuba descends primarily from three groups: Spanish settlers and immigrants – drawn largely from Andalusia, Galicia, Asturias, and the Canary Islands — sub-Saharan Africans transported to the island through the transatlantic slave trade, and the pre-Columbian indigenous peoples, chiefly the Taíno and Ciboney. A significant, though demographically contested, share of Cubans carries mixed ancestry from all three groups, not as a product of recent admixture but of centuries of intermarriage accumulated across many generations. While Afro-Cubans and Cubans of Spanish descent have endured as distinct ethnocultural units, no equivalent indigenous-descended group survived the catastrophic demographic collapse of the sixteenth century; Taíno ancestry nonetheless persists in the Cuban population at the genetic level, as evidenced by mitochondrial DNA studies. Cuban Spanish, a variety of Spanish, is the native language of virtually all Cubans on the island and remains widely spoken among a large proportion of the diaspora.
History
The population of Cuba prior to European contact consisted primarily of the Taíno and Ciboney peoples, with smaller groups of Guanahatabey inhabiting the island's westernmost regions. Spanish colonization, initiated following Christopher Columbus's arrival in 1492, resulted in the catastrophic decline of the indigenous population through epidemic disease, forced labor, and violence.
To sustain the plantation economy that emerged in the eighteenth century—centered above all on sugar cultivation—the Spanish colonial administration oversaw the large-scale forced importation of enslaved Africans. By the mid-nineteenth century, Cuba had become one of the largest slave societies in the Western Hemisphere, with Africans and their descendants constituting a substantial portion of the island's population, drawn from numerous West and Central African societies, including Yoruba-, Fon-, and Kongo-speaking peoples.
Spanish settlers—both Iberian-born peninsulares and American-born criollos—completed the colonial demographic triad. The prolonged and coerced cohabitation among these groups, along with the cultural exchange it engendered, gave rise to a syncretic society whose religious practices, music, and social customs reflected multiple origins. The Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz described this process as transculturation—a term he coined to denote the mutual transformation of cultures in sustained contact—and identified it as a defining characteristic of Cuban civilization.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a distinct creole consciousness—often articulated under the rubric of Cubanidad—had begun to emerge among the island's non-peninsular population. This developing identity was shaped by the plantation economy, by the growth of Havana as a cosmopolitan urban center, and by the proliferation of cultural forms that drew simultaneously on African, Spanish, and residual indigenous influences, including the danzón, the décima, the syncretic religious practices associated with Regla de Ocha, and the mutual-aid and ritual societies of the Abakuá. The emergence of a distinctly Cuban cultural identity developed alongside the political tensions of colonial society, including resentment of Spanish trade restrictions, the contradictions of a slaveholding creole elite seeking greater autonomy, and the gradual emergence of abolitionist sentiment.
The articulation of Cuban national identity as an explicit political project reached a decisive stage during the independence struggles of the second half of the nineteenth century. The Ten Years' War (1868–1878), initiated in part by creole planters such as Carlos Manuel de Céspedes—who freed his own slaves at the outset of the insurgency—placed questions of race and inclusion at the center of the emerging nationalist movement. The figure of José Martí, the leading ideologue of Cuban independence, gave the movement its most influential theoretical expression. In essays including Nuestra América (1891) and Mi raza (1893), Martí argued that racial divisions were incompatible with the construction of a free republic and that Cuban identity itself constituted the basis of national unity. The Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898) gave material form to this vision: the mambí insurgent armies were notably multiracial in composition, and Afro-Cuban officers—most prominently Antonio Maceo, known as the "Bronze Titan"—achieved prominence at the highest levels of command. The war's conclusion, however, brought not sovereignty but American military intervention and a prolonged period of U.S. occupation and political oversight, which significantly shaped the subsequent development of Cuban national identity.
The Cuban Republic established in 1902 inherited both the egalitarian ideals of the independence movement and the racial inequalities of the colonial period. The official republican ideology was grounded in Martí's concept of raceless nationalism, yet historians have argued that this universalist framework often discouraged autonomous Afro-Cuban political mobilization by portraying race-based advocacy as contrary to national unity. The Partido Independiente de Color, founded in 1908 to advocate for Afro-Cuban political representation, was outlawed under the Morúa Amendment of 1910; its armed protest in 1912 was met with military suppression in which thousands of Afro-Cubans were killed. Nonetheless, the Afrocubanismo cultural movement of the 1920s and 1930s—associated with figures including the poet Nicolás Guillén, the novelist Alejo Carpentier, and Ortiz himself—reasserted the African dimension of Cuban culture as fundamental to national identity. At the same time, the pervasive economic, political, and cultural influence of the United States contributed to the development of a reactive nationalism through which many Cubans increasingly defined their collective identity in opposition to American dominance.
The Cuban Revolution of 1959, led by Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement, represented both a political rupture and an attempt to reconstruct Cuban national identity on new ideological foundations. The revolutionary government declared the elimination of racial discrimination an immediate social objective and moved to dismantle many of the institutional structures it identified as mechanisms through which inequality had been reproduced. National identity was increasingly reframed in terms of revolutionary commitment and socialist internationalism. The ideal of the hombre nuevo (new man), theorized by Che Guevara in his 1965 essay El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba, emphasized collective sacrifice, socialist construction, and anti-imperialism. This anti-imperialist identity was projected internationally through Cuba's military and civilian interventions in Africa and Latin America, most notably in Angola, where Cuban forces supported the MPLA government against UNITA and South African forces between 1975 and 1991, and in Ethiopia, where Cuba intervened on behalf of the Derg during the Ogaden War of 1977–1978. These interventions were presented by the Cuban government as expressions of Third-Worldist solidarity and as continuations of anti-colonial struggle, drawing explicitly on Cuba's historical experiences of colonialism and slavery and on Martí's anti-imperialist legacy. The revolution's emphasis on a unitary, state-centered national identity simultaneously marginalized political dissent and contributed to the formation of a substantial emigrant diaspora, particularly in the United States, whose members developed competing interpretations of Cuban identity rooted in exile and opposition to the revolutionary state.
Demographics of Cuba
Census data
The Cuban Census of 2012, conducted between 15 and 24 September of that year by the National Office of Statistics and Information (Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas e Información, ONEI), remains, as of 2026, the most recent completed national population census on the island. Cuba follows a decennial census cycle; a new Population and Housing Census had originally been scheduled for September 2022, but has been postponed on multiple occasions – first to 2025, then to 2026 – owing to the country's severe economic crisis and the logistical constraints it has produced. ONEI conducted a census rehearsal in the municipality of Santa Cruz del Norte, Mayabeque, in November 2025 in preparation for the 2026 census; the full results had not been published as of mid-year. The demographic data presented in this section accordingly reflect conditions recorded in September 2012; subsequent changes are summarised in the subsection below.
According to the 2012 census, Cuba's resident population stood at 11,167,325 inhabitants, of whom 5,570,825 were male and 5,596,500 female, yielding a sex ratio of 995 males per 1,000 females. This figure represented a slight decline from the 11,177,743 inhabitants recorded in the 2002 census — the first intercensal population decrease since the independence wars — attributable to a total fertility rate below replacement level and a negative migration balance. The most populous municipalities at the time of the census were Havana (2,106,146 inhabitants), Santiago de Cuba (506,037), Holguín (346,195), Camagüey (323,309), and Santa Clara (240,543).
Demographic changes since 2012
Cuba's population has undergone accelerating decline since the 2012 census, driven by three mutually reinforcing simultaneous processes: a total fertility rate that has remained persistently below replacement level, a negative natural increase — with deaths consistently exceeding births – and mass emigration of historically unprecedented scale.
Fertility rate and natural population change
Cuba has not reached replacement-level fertility since 1977 – though some official Cuban sources, such as the country's 2017 report to the UN Commission on Population and Development and the Statistical Health Yearbook 2022, place the definitive fall below the threshold of 2.1 children per woman in 1978 —, placing it among the earliest and most prolonged cases of sub-replacement fertility among developing economies.