๐ How Rare Are You in Cuba?
๐จ๐บ Genetic Landscape of Cuba
Cuba's genetics tell the story of the Caribbean's most complex colonial history โ Taรญno Indigenous, Spanish colonial, West African (via the slave trade), Chinese indentured labor, and later European immigration. The resulting admixture varies dramatically: western Cuba shows more European genetic influence, while eastern provinces like Santiago de Cuba carry stronger African markers. Despite decades of self-identification as mestizo, genetic studies show Cubans carry roughly 72% European, 20% African, and 8% Indigenous DNA on average.
What is unusual about the African side is how precisely it was remembered. Elsewhere in the Americas the origins blurred into one word; on the island the religious houses kept the labels โ Lucumรญ for Yoruba speakers, Kongo for the Bantu peoples of Central Africa, Carabalรญ for the Cross River communities of the Calabar coast, whose descendants still run the Abakuรก societies of Havana, Matanzas and Cรกrdenas. Liturgical Lucumรญ holds on to Yoruba words that ordinary Cuban speech lost generations ago. The European side is just as specific: much of the Spanish migration arrived after Spanish rule ended in 1898 rather than during the colonial centuries, and Canary Islanders came in such numbers that Cuban Spanish is usually described as Canarian's closest relative.
๐๏ธ The box Cuba asks you to tick
Cuba is one of the countries whose state counts a physical trait directly. The Censo de Población y Viviendas 2012, run by the Oficina Nacional de Estadística e Información (ONEI), counted 11,167,325 people and recorded every one of them under one of three skin-colour categories — blanca, negra, or mestiza o mulata. The national answer came back 64.1% white, 9.3% black and 26.6% mixed.
That answer is published province by province, and the provinces do not look like the country. Villa Clara returned 82.5% blanca; Santiago de Cuba returned 25.6%, with 60.2% mestiza o mulata. A single national figure for Cuba is hiding at least two distributions. Note also what the census does not publish: there is no eye-colour or hair-colour figure anywhere in its output, which is why the tables below sit on different footing from the population count.
๐๏ธ Eye Color
| Brown | 55% |
| Dark Brown | 20% |
| Hazel | 10% |
| Green | 8% |
| Blue | 5% |
| Gray | 2% |
๐ Hair Color
| Black | 45% |
| Dark Brown | 30% |
| Brown | 15% |
| Blonde | 5% |
| Other | 5% |
๐ฉธ Blood Type
| O+ | 46% |
| A+ | 22% |
| B+ | 14% |
| AB+ | 3% |
| O- | 7% |
| A- | 4% |
| B- | 3% |
| AB- | 1% |
Trait frequencies on this page come from public and institutional datasets โ see Data Sources.
🧮 Calculate Your Rarity in Cuba
Pick your eye colour, hair colour and blood type. The calculator uses Cuba's own figures from the tables above, not world averages.
This is an estimate, not a measurement. It multiplies three national frequencies as if they were independent, and they are not: eye and hair colour share pigmentation genes, so a combination that tends to run together, such as blue eyes with blonde hair, is more common than the multiplication suggests, while one that rarely does, such as blue eyes with black hair, is rarer. Blood type is independent of both. The frequencies are national averages from public datasets — see Data Sources.
That number describes the body you were born with. Fraeon, our other site, does the same arithmetic for the part you chose: the films, series, games, books, anime and manga you have actually finished. Start your log →
๐งฌ What that box turned out to predict
How much does one of those categories tell you about descent? Someone has measured it. A 2014 paper in PLoS Genetics by Marcheco-Teruel and colleagues at the National Centre of Medical Genetics in Havana genotyped 1,019 people across all 16 provinces and set their self-reported category against their genetic ancestry. People who reported blanco averaged 86% European ancestry, mestizo 63.8% and negro 29%.
So the categories track ancestry on average — and the same paper reports overlap in measured pigmentation between the three groups, which is the half that matters if you read a national percentage as a fact about yourself. The study put the island at 72% European, 20% African and 8% Native American ancestry overall, arriving unevenly: 34.5% of maternal mtDNA lineages were Native American against 0.5% of paternal Y lineages, and African ancestry ran from 11% in Mayabeque and Sancti Spíritus to 40% in Guantánamo.
๐ Two given names, and a registrar who can say no
Cuban given names were capped by statute. Article 43 of Ley 51 de 1985, the Registro Civil law, held that no person could be registered with more than two given names, and that names had to be “en correspondencia con el desarrollo educacional y cultural del pueblo y sus tradiciones”. The article set out no list of approved names — the judgement sat with the registrar, who under article 95 of Resolución 249/2015 could suspend a birth registration for fifteen working days while the parents picked another, and enter a parent’s name if they did not.
Article 45 handled surnames: a child’s first surname was the father’s first, the second the mother’s first, subject to any agreement to set a different order. That statute is on its way out. Ley 180 de 2025, “Del Registro Civil”, published in Gaceta Oficial No. 26 Ordinaria de 2026 under the identifier GOC-2026-227-O26, lists Ley 51 de 1985 among the laws it repeals. The Gaceta entry records the repeal but not what replaces articles 43 and 45, so we are not going to guess at the new rule. That is the machinery behind how rare a Cuban name can be.
โญ Rare Facts About Cuba
Where these Cuba numbers come from
Population and the three skin-colour shares: the Censo de Población y Viviendas 2012, run by the Oficina Nacional de Estadística e Información (ONEI). Ancestry percentages: Marcheco-Teruel et al., PLoS Genetics 10(7): e1004488, 24 July 2014. Name law: the Gaceta Oficial entry for Ley 180 de 2025, plus the text of articles 43 and 45 of Ley 51 de 1985 and article 95 of Resolución 249/2015 as quoted by a Cuban municipal civil-registry site (rcabaiguan.cu). The eye-colour, hair-colour and blood-type tables above are modelled estimates — no Cuban institution publishes those distributions. More at Data Sources. Last checked September 2026.