Cuba

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

Cuba's 1976 constitution originally declared the state atheist and scientific materialist, restricting religious practice and barring practicing believers from Communist Party membership and many professional advancements, a policy eased significantly following Pope John Paul II's landmark 1998 visit, the first papal visit to Cuba, which the government permitted partly to improve international standing, and formalized through 1992 constitutional amendments that redefined Cuba as a secular rather than atheist state and lifted the party membership bar for believers.

Subsequent papal visits by Benedict XVI in 2012 and Francis in 2015, the latter helping broker the 2014 to 2015 thaw in United States-Cuba relations announced jointly by Presidents Obama and Castro, reflected the Catholic Church's cautiously rebuilt institutional role as a rare independent voice within Cuban civil society.

Santeria and other Afro-Cuban religions, long tolerated informally at the popular level even during the officially atheist period, have gained greater public visibility and even limited government promotion for tourism purposes in recent decades, though religious organizations of all kinds in Cuba continue to operate under significant state monitoring and registration requirements characteristic of the country's one-party system.

Sources Between God and the Party: Religion and Politics in Revolutionary CubaJohn M. Kirk with Cuba: Religion and Revolutionary InstitutionalizationMargaret E. Crahan, Papal Overtures in a Cuban Key: The Pope's Visit and Civic Space for Cuban ReligionAntonio M. Stevens-Arroyo (ed.), Policy of Empowerment: Pope Francis in CubaPetra Kuivala, Apostolic Journey to Mexico and to the Republic of Cuba (Benedict XVI, March 2012)Holy See Press Office / Benedict XVI