Ethnic groups

The Guanahatabey and Ciboney peoples were among the original hunter-gatherer societies to inhabit Cuba by about 4000 BC, the former living in the extreme west of the island and the latter mainly on the cays to the south, with limited numbers in other places. The Taino (Arawakan Indians) arrived later, probably about AD 500, and spread throughout Cuba, the rest of the Greater Antilles, and the Bahamas. They developed rudimentary agriculture and pottery and established villages that were unevenly distributed but mainly concentrated in the western part of the island. By the time of the Spanish conquest, the Taino constituted nine-tenths of Cuba's inhabitants. Estimates of the total indigenous population at the beginning of the 16th century vary widely and range as high as 600,000; however, the most likely total was about 75,000. By the 1550s only some 3,000 scattered individuals remained, their communities having been wiped out by European diseases, severe treatment and unhealthy working conditions (particularly in the Spanish gold mines), starvation resulting from low agricultural productivity, and suicides. Their only surviving descendants today may be a few families based in the Sierra del Purial of easternmost Cuba.

mulatto 51%, white 37%, black 11%, Chinese 1%

Religion

Cuba has many faiths representing the widely varying culture. Catholicism was brought to the island by the Spanish, and is the most dominant faith. After Fidel Castro took over, Cuba became atheistic and punished religious practice. Since the Fourth Cuban Communist Party Congress in 1991, restrictions have been eased and, according to the National Catholic Observer, direct challenges by state institutions to the right to religion have all but disappeared, though the church still faces restrictions of written and electronic communication, and can only accept donations from state-approved funding sources. The Roman Catholic Church is made up of the Cuban Catholic Bishops' Conference (COCC), led by Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino, Cardinal Archbishop of Havana It has eleven dioceses, 56 orders of nuns and 24 orders of priests. In January 1998, Pope John Paul II paid a historic visit to the island, invited by the Cuban government and Catholic Church.

The religious landscape of Cuba is also strongly marked by syncretisms of various kinds. This diversity derives from West and Central Africans who were transported to Cuba, and in effect reinvented their African religions. They did so by combining them with elements of the Catholic belief system, with a result very similar to Brazilian Umbanda. Catholicism is often practised in tandem with Santería, a mixture of Catholicism and other, mainly African, faiths that include a number of cult religions. Cuba’s patron saint, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre (the Virgin of Cobre) is a syncretism with the Santería goddess Ochún. The important religious festival "La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre" is celebrated by Cubans annually on 8 September. Other religions practised are Palo Monte, and Abakuá, which have large parts of their liturgy in African languages.

Protestantism, introduced from the United States in the 18th century, has seen a steady increase in popularity. 300,000 Cubans belong to the island’s 54 Protestant denominations. Pentecostalism has grown rapidly in recent years, and the Assemblies of God alone claims a membership of over 100,000 people. The Episcopal Church of Cuba claims 10,000 adherents. Cuba has small communities of Jews, Muslims and members of the Bahá'í Faith. Havana has just three active synagogues and no mosque. Most Jewish Cubans are descendants of Polish and Russian Ashkenazi Jews who fled pogroms at the beginning of the 20th century. There is, however, a sizeable number of Sephardic Jews in Cuba, who trace their origin to Turkey (primarily Istanbul and Thrace). Most of these Sephardic Jews live in the provinces, although they maintain a synagogue in Havana. In the 1960s, almost 8,000 Jews left for Miami. In the 1990s, approximately 400 Jewish Cubans relocated to Israel in a co-ordinated exodus using visas provided by nations sympathetic to their desire to move to Israel.