Cuba: An Island of Vintage Cars and Living History

• Capital: Havana (population about 2.1 million) [1]
• Population: roughly 11 million [2]
• Area: 109,884 square kilometers, the largest island in the Caribbean [1]
• Official language: Spanish [1]
• Currency: Cuban peso (CUP) [3]
• One claim to fame: home to around 60,000 American cars from the 1950s, still on the road [4]

I grew up watching old movies where the cars had fins and chrome and looked like rocket ships. Then I read about Havana, where those same cars are not props. They are taxis. They are someone's grandfather's daily driver. Cuba is one of the few places on Earth where the 1950s never really ended in a mechanical sense, and that detail alone tells you something about how the country has lived for the last seven decades. But Cuba is also salsa, sugar, baseball, cigars, and a literacy rate most countries would envy. Here's the thing - the more you read about Cuba, the more it refuses to fit into the postcard.

Cuba is bigger than you probably think. At roughly 110,000 square kilometers, it is larger than every other Caribbean island combined, and its main island stretches about 1,250 kilometers from end to end [1]. That is roughly the driving distance from Chicago to Miami. The country also includes more than 4,000 smaller islands and cays, the largest of which is the Isla de la Juventud off the southern coast.

Geographically, Cuba sits where the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean meet. Florida is only about 150 kilometers north across the Straits of Florida. On a clear day from a tall building in Key West, you cannot quite see Cuba, but you feel like you should be able to.

The terrain runs from flat sugarcane plains to the Sierra Maestra mountains in the southeast, where Pico Turquino tops out at 1,974 meters [5]. The country has the largest wetland in the Caribbean - the Ciénaga de Zapata, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve that hosts the Cuban crocodile, one of the most endangered crocodiles on the planet.

Walk down a Havana street and you will see a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air parked behind a 1955 Buick Roadmaster. This is not a classic car show. This is rush hour.

When the United States imposed its trade embargo in 1962, the cars Americans had bought in Cuba before the revolution stayed put. Cubans could not import new American vehicles, and they could not get original parts. So they kept the old cars running with whatever they had - Soviet engines from Ladas, hand-fabricated parts, diesel motors from boats and tractors. Estimates put the number of pre-1960 American cars still on Cuban roads at around 60,000 [4]. They are called "almendrones" (big almonds) for their rounded shape.

These cars are now a tourism industry of their own. A pink convertible Cadillac ride along the Malecón is one of Havana's signature experiences. But for many Cubans, the car is also a livelihood - a shared taxi running fixed routes for a few pesos a head.

Cuban music is not a single sound. It is a collision of Spanish guitar, African percussion, French ballroom dance, and a stubborn local imagination that has been remixing those elements for 500 years. Son cubano, born in the eastern provinces in the late 1800s, became the foundation for what the rest of the world later called salsa. Mambo, cha-cha-chá, rumba, danzón, and bolero all have Cuban roots.

UNESCO has placed both rumba and the punto, a guajiro folk-poetry tradition, on its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage [6]. The Buena Vista Social Club, the 1997 album that introduced a generation of forgotten Havana musicians to a global audience, sold over 12 million copies and put Cuban son back on the world map.

Music here is not a performance separate from life. It is in the doorways, the public squares, and the back of the almendrón. I had to look this up twice, but Cuba produces musicians at a per capita rate that puts most countries to shame, partly because music education is free through the state conservatory system.

For most of its colonial and post-colonial history, Cuba ran on sugar. By the 1920s, the island was the world's largest sugar exporter, and at its peak the industry employed more than half the rural workforce. After 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union (Cuba's main buyer), the sugar industry contracted dramatically. Today nickel mining, tourism, pharmaceuticals, and remittances are larger pieces of the economy [7].

Tobacco tells a different story. The Vuelta Abajo region in Pinar del Río province, in the far west, is widely considered the best tobacco-growing soil on Earth. Cuban cigars - Cohiba, Montecristo, Romeo y Julieta, Partagás - are made from leaves grown there, hand-rolled, and aged for years. The cigars are still rolled by torcedores, master rollers who train for years and can produce a few hundred cigars in a workday. UNESCO inscribed Cuban cigar-making knowledge in its Living Heritage records, and the Vuelta Abajo landscape is part of the Viñales Valley UNESCO World Heritage Site [6].

This is the fact that surprises Americans the most. Cuba spends a small fraction of what the United States spends per capita on health, but it produces medical outcomes that are competitive with much wealthier countries. Life expectancy at birth is about 78 years, comparable to the United States [2]. Infant mortality runs around 5 per 1,000 live births, slightly better than the U.S. figure in some recent years [2]. The country has roughly 8 doctors per 1,000 people, one of the highest densities in the world [8].

Cuba also exports doctors. Tens of thousands of Cuban medical professionals work in countries across Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean under government-run programs - a major source of state revenue and a tool of foreign policy.

Literacy is universal. The 1961 mass literacy campaign, in which thousands of young volunteers fanned out into the countryside to teach reading, drove the rate above 96 percent within a year, and it has stayed near 100 percent since [9]. Higher education is free at the point of use.

Forget soccer. In Cuba, baseball is the sport. It arrived from the United States in the 1860s, planted itself, and never left. The Serie Nacional, Cuba's top professional league, has produced some of the greatest players ever to take a field - Yoenis Céspedes, Yasiel Puig, José Abreu, and José Fernández all came up through the Cuban system before leaving for Major League Baseball.

For decades, the Cuban national team dominated international amateur baseball, winning three Olympic gold medals and 25 Baseball World Cups. Pickup games happen on every patch of dirt and pavement on the island. Back home in Montana, baseball is a Saturday afternoon pastime. In Cuba, it is closer to what football is in Texas - identity, ritual, civic glue.

Habana Vieja, the old colonial core of Havana, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the largest preserved Spanish colonial city centers in the Americas. Founded in 1519, it has cathedrals, plazas, and fortresses that have stood for over four centuries, including the Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro at the harbor entrance [6].

A long restoration project, led for decades by the city historian Eusebio Leal until his death in 2020, brought hundreds of buildings back from the brink. Walking through Plaza Vieja or down Calle Obispo at dusk, you see why people fall hard for this city. It is not a museum. People live there, hang laundry from baroque balconies, play dominoes on the sidewalk, and shout across narrow streets.

The capital of Cuba is Havana, with a population of about 2.1 million. It sits on the northwestern coast and has been the country's political, economic, and cultural center since 1607, when the Spanish moved the capital from Santiago de Cuba.

The 1962 U.S. trade embargo cut off imports of new American vehicles and parts, so Cubans kept the cars they already owned running. About 60,000 pre-1960 American cars remain on the road, often rebuilt with Soviet or improvised engines.

Spanish is the official and dominant language of Cuba, spoken by virtually the entire population. Cuban Spanish has its own accent and vocabulary, with influences from African languages brought by enslaved people during the colonial era.

Yes. Cuba covers about 109,884 square kilometers, making it the largest island in the Caribbean by both area and population. It is bigger than the rest of the Caribbean islands combined.

Cuba is best known for its 1950s American cars, hand-rolled cigars, salsa and son music, baseball, vintage Havana architecture, white sand beaches, and a healthcare system that produces unusually strong outcomes for a low-income country.

1. The World Factbook: Cuba
2. World Bank Data: Cuba
3. Banco Central de Cuba
4. Smithsonian Magazine: How Cuba's Vintage Cars Survived
5. Encyclopaedia Britannica: Cuba
6. UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Cuba
7. Oficina Nacional de Estadística e Información de Cuba
8. WHO: Cuba Country Profile
9. UNESCO Institute for Statistics: Cuba