🇨🇺Cuba

Cuba spans 19°50′–23°15′N as the largest island in the Caribbean, covering approximately 109,884 km² in an elongated archipelago that stretches 1,250 km west to east at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico. The terrain consists mostly of low rolling plains and hill ranges including the Sierra de los Órganos and the Escambray Mountains, with the Sierra Maestra in the southeast rising to Pico Turquino at 1,974 m, the country's highest peak.

The climate is uniformly tropical savanna Aw at low elevations across the bulk of the island, with smaller pockets of tropical monsoon Am on the wettest mountain slopes, while the Guantánamo area in the lee of the Sierra Maestra experiences drier Köppen-BSh conditions.

Havana sees January highs of 27°C and lows of 19°C and July highs of 32°C with approximately 1,200 mm of rainfall sharply split between a wet season from May to October and a dry winter. Santiago de Cuba in the southeast lee is hotter and drier with around 1,100 mm annually, while the windward mountain slopes of the Sierra del Rosario in the west and the Sierra Maestra receive considerably more.

Cuba lies within the Atlantic hurricane belt and has taken direct landfalls from many major hurricanes since 1963, among them Flora, Michelle, Gustav, Ike, Irma (Category 5 in 2017), and Ian (2022). Cold fronts descending from higher latitudes periodically reach the western provinces in winter, briefly lowering surface temperatures sharply.

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) exerts a strong influence on winter rainfall distribution and hurricane frequency. Rising sea levels, increasing coral bleaching, and storm surge hazards pose growing environmental stress to the shallow cayos and densely populated north coast.

Our archive covers 31 Cuban cities with daily ERA5 reanalysis data going back to 1940. The hottest July afternoons are in Guantánamo, with average highs around 33.8°C, while Santa Clara has the coldest January nights, with average lows near 17.8°C. Comparing the last decade against the 1940–1970 baseline, mean temperatures across these cities have risen by about 0.7°C.