Cuba's religious landscape blends nominal Catholic majority affiliation, historically around 60 to 65 percent though with low regular practice, with widespread practice of Santeria, also called Regla de Ocha, an Afro-Cuban religion syncretizing Yoruba orisha worship with Catholic saints developed among enslaved West Africans brought to Cuban sugar plantations from the sixteenth century onward, alongside smaller Protestant and religiously unaffiliated populations, per estimates reflected in Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020. Santeria's structure of orisha deities, each syncretized with a corresponding Catholic saint such as Yoruba Chango with Saint Barbara and Yemaya with Our Lady of Regla, allowed enslaved practitioners to maintain African religious practice under colonial Catholic surveillance, and the tradition has since spread significantly beyond Cuba through emigration, particularly to Miami and other United States communities following the 1959 revolution and subsequent waves of Cuban exile.
Fidel Castro's 1959 revolutionary government declared Cuba an atheist state in 1962, restricting religious practice, closing religious schools and barring believers from Communist Party membership, a policy substantially reversed only in the 1990s when Cuba redefined itself constitutionally as secular rather than atheist.
Sources Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020Pew Research Center with Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban ReligionDavid H. Brown