Cuba

Interesting Facts About Cuba

• Cuba is the largest country in the Caribbean by area and the third-largest by population, after Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
• Cuba comprises the main island plus 4,195 islands, islets, and cays.
• Cuba's population descends primarily from three groups: Spanish settlers from regions like Andalusia and Galicia, sub-Saharan Africans brought through the transatlantic slave trade, and pre-Columbian indigenous peoples including the Taíno and Ciboney.
• Afro-Cubans are descended primarily from the Yoruba people, Bantu people from the Congo basin, and groups from Dahomey, as well as North African refugees including Sahrawi Arabs from Western Sahara.
• Cuba has one of the lowest birth rates in the Western Hemisphere at 9.88 births per thousand population.
• Taíno ancestry persists in the Cuban population at the genetic level, as evidenced by mitochondrial DNA studies, despite no surviving indigenous-descended group after the demographic collapse of the sixteenth century.
• A 2014 genetic study found that autosomal genetic ancestry in Cuba is 72% European, 20% African, and 8% Indigenous.

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