Cuba 🇨🇺

Cuba is a sovereign country in the Caribbean, in the wider region of the Americas. In formal use it is Republic of Cuba. The capital is Havana.

Some 11.0 million people call it home, placing it 86th of 249 by population — between the United Arab Emirates above it and Czechia below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 1st of 28 in size and 3rd in population.

Its territory runs to 109,884 km², which ranks it 106th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Bulgaria and just ahead of Guatemala. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is a little larger than Iceland.

Cuba has no land border with any country, which changes what "nearby" means. Measured centre to centre in a straight line, the closest other entry on this site is Cayman Islands, roughly 230 km away. These are approximate distances between representative points, not the shortest crossing between two shorelines, so treat them as a sense of scale rather than a sailing chart.

No land border also means no land crossing: everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air. That single fact drives a lot of what follows on this page, from how goods reach the shops to why Cuba's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 21.5° N, 80.0° W, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,393 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

India, Mauritania and Myanmar sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

There is no land frontier at all — every boundary it has is a coastline. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, which shapes how it trades and who it deals with.

Density comes out at around 100 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is monolingual: Spanish. Spanish is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 22 other entries including Argentina, Belize, Bolivia and Chile.

The demonym is Cuban, so residents are Cubans.

Inside the Americas it places 14th of 55 by population, and it accounts for 25% of everyone living in the Caribbean.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Cuba ranks 106th of 249 by area and 86th by population. That works out at 0.073% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.14% of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Cuba in the size ordering are Bulgaria at 110,879 km² and Guatemala at 108,889 km², against Cuba's 109,884 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Cuba averages 100 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 115th of the 247 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

The Cuban convertible peso (CUC) is used only in Cuba among the 249 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

Language reaches wider still. Spanish is listed for 23 entries here, Cuba among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

More than one currency circulates: Cuban convertible peso (CUC) and Cuban peso (CUP). It is issued for Cuba alone.

Havana is the city to remember for this country.

Its internet country code is .cu. To phone it from abroad you dial +53. In ISO terms it is cu in two letters and CUB in three.

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.

Zoom in from the world to Caribbean and Cuba sits 3rd of 28 by population and 1st by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Dominican Republic just above and Puerto Rico just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

Haiti is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Caribbean has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇩🇴 Dominican Republic
• 🇵🇷 Puerto Rico
• 🇭🇹 Haiti