Genetics. An autosomal study from 2014 found the genetic ancestry in Cuba to be 72% European, 20% African and 8% Amerindian.
Cuba is a Caribbean island nation with a population of 11 million. It is a significantly diverse country, with 64% of the country identifying as white, 27% identifying as mixed race, and 9% identifying as Afro-Cuban. There are a significant number of Asians as well.
Just how many of the 11.1 million Cubans in the country are Afro-Cuban? That is a hard question to answer, even for Latin American and Africana Studies professor Devyn Spence Benson of Davidson College. Based on those who self-identify, she says, the estimate is between 33 percent and 60 percent.
Today, there are only 150 Chinese-born residents living in the Latin country, but somewhere around 114,000 Cubans with mixed Chinese heritage. Most do not speak Chinese and have never been to China, yet feel a strong connection to their Asian heritage.
Two out of 132 male samples belonged to East Asian haplogroup O2, which is found in significant frequencies among Cantonese people and is found in 1.5% of the Cuban population. In the 1920s, an additional 30,000 Chinese arrived; the immigrants were exclusively male.
Cubans themselves are, as recent DNA studies prove, partially Africans. But Cuba's expression of African culture evolved primarily as a mechanism of existential survival and adaptation for the African men and women that experienced slavery, dehumanization, and racism on the island for 350 years.
Cuba participated heavily in the slave trade to obtain cheap labor for the sugar plantations beginning in the 16th century. Cuba stopped officially participating in the slave trade in 1867 but the institution of slavery was not abolished on the island until 1886.
The European heritage of Cubans comes primarily from one source: the Spaniards (including Canarians, Asturians, Catalans, Galicians, Andalusians, and Castilians). The native white population are nearly all descendants of the Spaniards and most non-white Cubans also have Spanish ancestry.
Although Afro-Cubans can be found throughout Cuba, Eastern Cuba has a higher concentration of Afro-Cubans than other parts of the island and Havana has the largest population of Afro-Cubans of any city in Cuba.
Wages, development, and pensions
After Cuba lost Soviet subsidies in 1991, malnutrition resulted in an outbreak of diseases. Despite this, the poverty level reported by the government is one of the lowest in the developing world, ranking 6th out of 108 countries, 4th in Latin America and 48th among all countries.
Cuba is a majority Christian nation, with Islam being one of the smallest minority faiths in the country. According to a 2011 Pew Research Center report, there were then 10,000 Muslims in Cuba who constitute less than 0.1% of the population. As of 2012, most of the 10,000 Cuban Muslims were converts to the religion.
About Hispanic Origin
OMB defines "Hispanic or Latino" as a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.
The first group originated from northern South America (Venezuela and Guyana), settled in Trinidad around 6,000 BCE, and then expanded to the north along the Lesser Antilles1,2. The second group moved around 4,500–4,000 BCE from the Yucatan Peninsula to Hispaniola and Cuba—the largest island of the Greater Antilles1,2.
Cuba had been a colony from 1492 until 1898 when the United States took over the territory in the Spanish–American War. Many Cubans have ancestry dating back from Spain. Many Spaniards escaped the first Spanish Civil War and went to Cuba, and other countries, around 1820–1825.
According to Korean Studies scholar Mark A. Peterson of Brigham Young University, Korea has the longest unbroken chain of slavery of any society in history (spanning about 1,500 years), which he attributes to a long history of peaceful transitions and stable societies in Korea.
Yet Cuba remained one of Spain's two colonies in the New World. (The other was Puerto Rico.) It was governed from Madrid much as it had been governed since it was first occupied and settled by the Spaniards in 1511.
The slave trade in Cuba would not systematically end until chattel Cuban slavery was abolished by Spanish royal decree in 1886, making it one of the last countries in the Western Hemisphere (preceding only Brazil) to formally abolish slavery.
According to another study in 2008, regarding the geographical origin attributed to each mtDNA haplogroup, 55% of the sequences found in Cubans are of West Eurasian origin (namely, Europe and the Middle East) and 45% of African origin Regarding Y-chromosome haplogroups (male lineages), 78.8% of the sequences found in ...
The original inhabitants of Cuba were the indigenous Ciboney and other Arawak speaking groups.
When Christopher Columbus first arrived in Cuba in 1492, he discovered an island already inhabited by three different groups of indigenous peoples: the Taínos, the Ciboneys, and the Guanajatabeyes. Currently, scholars estimate that there were between 50,000-300,000 indigenous people occupying the island at the time.
Cuba has an embassy in Moscow and an honorary consulate in Saint Petersburg. Around 55,000 people of Russian descent live in Cuba.
Some countries in the Eastern Bloc, such as Cuba, were often regarded as "Third World". The Third World was normally seen to include many countries with colonial pasts in Africa, Latin America, Oceania, and Asia.
Cuba is a multiracial society with a population of mainly Spanish and African origins. The largest organized religion is the Roman Catholic Church.
Thus, Latino refers to France, Spain, Italy and other regions where these languages are spoken. Nowadays, though, the definition has come to refer to Latin Americans, although its origins can be traced to the former Roman Empire. “All Hispanics are Latinos, but not all Latinos are Hispanics.