Flag: Cuba Emoji

The flag of Cuba, known as La Bandera de la Estrella Solitaria (the Lone Star Flag). Three navy-blue and two white horizontal stripes, with a red equilateral triangle at the hoist bearing a single white five-pointed star. Designed in New York in 1849 by Venezuelan-born independence organizer Narciso López and Cuban poet Miguel Teurbe Tolón, first stitched by Emilia Teurbe Tolón, and first hoisted over Cárdenas on May 19, 1850, during López's short-lived liberation raid. Officially adopted on May 20, 1902, when Cuba became an independent republic after four years of US military occupation.

The three blue stripes represent the three historical military departments into which Cuba was divided (western, central, eastern). The two white stripes stand for purity of purpose. The red triangle carries both the Masonic imagery common to 19th-century republican movements (López was a Freemason) and the blood shed for liberty, with its three sides echoing the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The lone white star is independence itself.

Cuba's and Puerto Rico's flags are deliberate mirror siblings. Cuban exiles helped Puerto Rican revolutionaries design their own flag in 1895 by reversing the Cuban palette: Cuba's blue stripes became Puerto Rico's red stripes, and Cuba's red triangle became blue. The symmetry encoded the shared Antillean struggle against Spain.

The emoji is a regional indicator sequence: U+1F1E8U+1F1E8 (C) + U+1F1FAU+1F1FA (U). Added to Emoji 2.0 in 2015.

🇨🇺 is one of the most politically layered flag emojis in use. Its three biggest posting communities are largely separate from each other and frequently use the same flag to signal opposite things.

The diaspora in South Florida is the loudest 🇨🇺 user on English-speaking social media. Of the estimated 2.4 million Cuban Americans, the majority lives in Miami-Dade County, where roughly 60% of residents claim Cuban heritage. Little Havana on Calle Ocho, Hialeah, and West Kendall run their own rhythm of Cafecito con Leche posts, Versailles-restaurant power-breakfast pics, and Domino Park selfies. Flag use spikes every July around anniversaries of the 2021 July 11 protests, every October 10 around Independence Day, and every time a family raft-story or a new Cuban athlete reaches US soil.

Inside Cuba, 🇨🇺 shows up on state media posts commemorating Revolution anniversaries, May Day marches in Revolution Square, and July 26 (Moncada). The government uses it in official communications and on the social feeds of ministers; opposition and independent media use it with a different charge.

The global salsa, son, and Latin jazz scene uses 🇨🇺 the way 🇯🇵 is used for anime: as a genre marker. From Havana Club bars in Europe to Cuban restaurants in Tokyo and Mexico City, 🇨🇺 shows up anywhere son cubano, rumba, or mambo plays. Buena Vista Social Club)'s 8-million-selling 1997 album, which won a Grammy and a documentary Oscar nomination, permanently stamped Cuban music on global ears.

Sports feeds. Cuban baseball is elite. At least 100 players born in Cuba have played in MLB since 2000, many through defection during international tournaments. Aroldis Chapman's $30.25M Reds contract (2010), Yasiel Puig's 2013 Dodgers debut, and the 2023 World Baseball Classic (where at least three Cuban national-team players defected during the tournament) all generated 🇨🇺 spikes. Cuba is also a boxing superpower, with 80+ Olympic medals in the sport.

• 🏛️
  Capital: Havana (La Habana; 23.11°N, 82.37°W)
• 👥
  Population: ~10.99 million (2024)
• 🗺️
  Area: 109,884 km² (largest Caribbean island)
• 💵
  Currency: Cuban peso (CUP, $)
• 🗣️
  Language: Spanish
• 📞
  Calling code: +53
• ⏰
  Time zone: EST / EDT (UTC−5 / UTC−4)
• 🌐
  Internet TLD: .cu

Foods that show up next to 🇨🇺

Landmarks that anchor travel content

The Cuban flag was designed in exile. In 1849, Venezuelan-born Narciso López, a former Spanish military officer who had turned against colonial rule, was plotting a filibuster expedition from the United States to liberate Cuba. He collaborated with Cuban poet Miguel Teurbe Tolón on a flag design. López drew inspiration from the Texas Lone Star flag, the French tricolor, and the Masonic symbolism common to 19th-century republican movements. Teurbe Tolón's wife Emilia stitched the first flag by hand in New York.

On May 19, 1850, López led a force of roughly 600 men in three ships from New Orleans to land at Cárdenas on Cuba's northern coast, where his flag was publicly hoisted for the first time. The expedition collapsed within days. A second expedition in August 1851 also failed; López was captured by Spanish forces and executed by garrote on September 1, 1851, in Havana. The flag outlived him.

It flew again during the Ten Years' War (1868 to 1878), the Little War (1879 to 1880), and the Cuban War of Independence (1895 to 1898), though the Demajagua flag hoisted by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes at the Grito de Yara (October 10, 1868) was the initial revolutionary banner. López's design was selected as the national flag by the Constitutional Convention of Guáimaro in 1869.

After Spain's defeat in the Spanish-American War (1898) and a four-year US military occupation, the flag was formally raised over El Morro castle in Havana on May 20, 1902, the day Cuba became an independent republic. That date, Independence Day under the pre-1959 calendar, has been replaced in the official revolutionary calendar by January 1 (Liberation Day) and July 26 (Revolution Day), but May 20 still has weight in the diaspora.

The emoji reads differently depending on who is posting. The diaspora in South Florida, most of whose families left during the 1959 to 1973 early revolutionary period, the 1980 Mariel boatlift, or the 1994 balsero crisis, frequently uses 🇨🇺 alongside ❤️ or 🕊️ to signify the lost homeland and to protest the Cuban government. Pro-Revolution accounts inside and outside Cuba use the same flag to celebrate the 1959 Triumph of the Revolution, the universal-healthcare and universal-literacy record, and Cuba's international medical missions, which have deployed over 400,000 doctors to 160+ countries since 1963.

Both posting groups tend to avoid the Demajagua flag (a blue canton over a red and white field, raised by Céspedes in 1868), which today appears mainly in academic and historical contexts and occasionally as a quiet dissident symbol.

The 1990s Cuban-American embrace of the flag as diaspora identity marker is one of the clearest examples of a flag outgrowing its government. When Gloria Estefan wears 🇨🇺, it means something very different than when a Cuban Foreign Ministry account posts it. The emoji itself is neutral.

• ⭐
  January 1: Liberation Day: Marks January 1, 1959, the day Batista fled Havana and the 26th of July Movement took the city. The most ideologically charged day on the calendar.
• 🚩
  May 1: International Workers' Day: Massive state-organized march through Revolution Square in Havana. The single biggest 🇨🇺 image moment of the year.
• 🎙️
  July 26: Revolution Day: Anniversary of the 1953 [Moncada Barracks attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_the_Moncada_Barracks) that launched Castro's 26th of July Movement. Fidel's speech site rotates between provinces each year.
• 🕊️
  October 10: Independence Day: Marks the 1868 Grito de Yara, when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes declared war on Spain and freed his own enslaved workers. The start of the Ten Years' War.
• 🎄
  December 25: Christmas Day: Restored as a public holiday in 1997 ahead of Pope John Paul II's 1998 visit; dropped by the revolutionary government in 1969.

• •The Cuban flag was designed by a Venezuelan (Narciso López), drawn by a Cuban poet (Miguel Teurbe Tolón), first stitched by the poet's wife (Emilia Teurbe Tolón), and first raised in battle in Cárdenas on May 19, 1850, 52 years before Cuba actually became an independent country.
• •Havana's iconic 1950s American cars (1959 Chevys, '55 Buicks, '57 Fords) survived because the 1960 US trade embargo froze automobile imports. Cuban mechanics kept them running for 65+ years with fabricated parts and Soviet-era engines. Around 60,000 are still on the road.
• •Cuba has more doctors per capita than any other Latin American country and has deployed over 400,000 medical professionals to 160 countries since 1963 under the government's medical-internationalism program, making Cuban doctors one of the country's largest export sectors.
• •The Buena Vista Social Club album (1997) sold over 8 million copies, reviving the careers of musicians who had been performing to empty Havana rooms. Ry Cooder recorded it in six days at EGREM studios in Havana.
• •About 2.4 million people of Cuban descent live in the United States, overwhelmingly concentrated in South Florida. Roughly 60% of Miami-Dade County residents identify as Cuban or Cuban-American.
• •Cuba is a boxing superpower. Cuban boxers have won 80+ Olympic medals, and Teófilo Stevenson (1972, 1976, 1980) and Félix Savón (1992, 1996, 2000) each won three consecutive heavyweight golds without ever turning professional.
• •José Martí (1853 to 1895) is one of the few historical figures revered equally by the Cuban government, the Miami exile community, and pro-democracy dissidents. His writings are quoted on all sides of every political argument about Cuba.
• •Cuba's flag was briefly raised upside-down on Guantanamo Bay's neighbor fence in 2016 during the Obama-era reopening of the US Embassy in Havana. Diplomatic protocol required a hasty correction before the flag ceremony.