Cuba Emoji & Symbols

🇨🇺 the Cuban flag comes first: pride, a baseball game, a trip, or a family that lives between Havana and Miami. Its colours work as hearts, 💙🤍❤️, and its two shapes have emoji of their own: ⭐ for la estrella solitaria, the lone star, and 🔺 for the red triangle. The coat of arms adds 🔑, a golden key, because Cuba was called the Key to the Gulf (la Llave del Golfo), and 🌴, the royal palm, which is also the national tree.

🚗 stands for the 1950s American cars that still drive Havana's streets, many of them working as shared taxis called almendrones. 🍹 is the mojito and ☕ the cafecito, the small, very sweet Cuban espresso. ⚾ is la pelota, the national sport, and 💃🕺 are son, rumba, mambo, cha-cha-chá and salsa, all of which grew out of Cuban music.

There is no cigar emoji, so people use 🚬 for a Cuban cigar, a habano; the best tobacco grows in the Vuelta Abajo region of Pinar del Río, around the Viñales valley. Two animals stand for the island itself: 🐊, because Cuba's long shape looks like a crocodile lying in the sea (the poet Nicolás Guillén called it un largo lagarto verde, a long green lizard) and the Cuban crocodile lives only here, and 🐦 for the tocororo, the national bird, whose blue, white and red feathers match the flag.

Cuban flag emoji: copy and paste 🇨🇺, and what the star and stripes mean

The Cuban flag emoji is not one picture character. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇨 and 🇺, the country code CU, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no country flag pictures in its emoji font, so on a Windows PC the same emoji appears as the letters CU. Copy it anyway: anyone on a phone sees the flag. On Discord you can also type :flag_cu:.

The flag was designed in 1849 for Narciso López's expedition against Spanish rule and became the flag of the republic in 1902. The three blue stripes stand for the three departments the island was divided into at the time, the two white ones for the purity of the patriots' cause, the red triangle for the blood shed for freedom and the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, and the white star for independence.

The flag of Puerto Rico 🇵🇷 is the same design with the colours swapped: red and white stripes and a blue triangle. It was adopted in 1895 by Puerto Rican patriots in New York who worked alongside the Cuban independence movement. For every other flag see our Flag Emoji collection.

Cuban food and drink emoji: ☕ 🍚 🫘 🐖 🍹

A Cuban plate in emoji is 🍚🫘 for moros y cristianos, black beans and white rice cooked together, 🐖 for lechón asado, roast pork, and 🍌 for plantains, fried green and smashed as tostones or ripe and sweet as maduros. 🍲 fits ajiaco, the stew of root vegetables and meats that the writer Fernando Ortiz used as an image of Cuba itself, a mix of everything that came to the island. 🥪 is the closest thing to a cubano, the pressed sandwich of ham, roast pork, Swiss cheese, pickles and mustard that Cuban immigrants made famous in Tampa and Miami.

For sweets and fruit people pair 🇨🇺 with 🥭 mango, 🍍 pineapple, 🥥 coconut, 🍮 flan and 🍦 for Coppelia, the huge ice cream parlour in Havana's Vedado district, open since 1966. ☕ is drunk all day: the sugar goes in while it brews, and the first drops are whipped with it into a sweet foam, the espumita.

Cuba is a rum country. The 🍹 mojito is rum, lime 🍋‍🟩, sugar, soda and hierbabuena, the local mint 🌿; the 🍸 daiquirí, named after a beach near Santiago de Cuba, is rum, lime and sugar, famous from El Floridita bar in Havana; and the Cuba libre is rum and cola with lime. 🥃 is rum served straight, the way older Cubans often drink it.

Cuban music, dance and sports emoji: 💃 🪘 ⚾ 🥊

Cuban music is built on percussion: 🪇 maracas, 🥁 bongos and timbales, and 🪘, the long drum, for the conga. Add 🎺 trumpet and 🎸 guitar (the Cuban tres is a guitar with three pairs of strings) and you have a son band like the ones the Buena Vista Social Club album made famous worldwide in 1997. UNESCO lists rumba in Cuba as Intangible Cultural Heritage since 2016.

⚾ baseball arrived in the 1860s and became the national game; Cuba won the Olympic baseball tournament in 1992, 1996 and 2004. 🥊 is the other great passion: Teófilo Stevenson and Félix Savón each won three Olympic heavyweight titles. 🤼 is for Mijaín López, the first wrestler to win five Olympic gold medals in a row (2008 to 2024), 🏐 for the women's volleyball team that won three straight Olympic golds from 1992 to 2000, and ♟️ for José Raúl Capablanca, world chess champion from 1921 to 1927.

There is no domino emoji, but Unicode has domino tile symbols such as 🁡, the double six. Dominoes are played on porches and sidewalks all over Cuba, usually with a double-nine set of 55 tiles rather than the double-six set drawn in Unicode.

Havana, holidays and faith emoji

Havana in emoji: 🏛️ for El Capitolio, finished in 1929, 🏰 for El Morro, the fortress at the mouth of the harbour, and 🌊🌇 for the Malecón, the seawall that runs about 8 km along the shore, where people sit in the evening and waves break over the wall in winter storms. Old Havana and its fortifications have been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1982. 🛺 is the closest emoji to a cocotaxi, the round yellow three-wheeler, and 🐎 stands for the horse-drawn carts and carriages still used in provincial towns. Outside the capital come 🏖️ Varadero, 🏝️ the cays of the north coast, ⛰️ the Sierra Maestra and the limestone hills of Viñales, and 🦩 the flamingos of the northern cays and wetlands.

On 8 September Cubans celebrate the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, patron saint of Cuba since 1916, whose basilica stands in El Cobre near Santiago. In Santería she is linked with Ochún, the orisha of rivers and love, whose colour is yellow, so devotees bring her 🌻 sunflowers; 🙏⛪ complete the message.

Christmas Eve, Nochebuena, is the night of the roast pig 🐖. Christmas Day was dropped as a public holiday in 1969, restored for 1997 as a one-time exception, and reinstated permanently in 1998. On 24 December the town of Remedios holds its Parrandas, a contest of floats and 🎆 fireworks between two neighbourhoods, and every July Santiago de Cuba fills with the drums and costumes of its 🎭 carnival.

Cuba symbols: the Cuban peso sign $ and how to type ñ, á and ¿

The Cuban peso symbol is $, the same character as the dollar; price boards often use it, and the currency code is CUP. Since 2021 the peso has been Cuba's only currency, after the convertible peso (CUC) was withdrawn, although US dollars and other foreign currency circulate widely and some shops sell only in them. Some currency converters show ₱ for the Cuban peso, but ₱ is the sign of the Philippine peso; in Cuba itself prices are written $.

Spanish, spoken by about 11 million people in Cuba by CLDR's estimate, uses the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet plus ñ as its 27th letter (as in año, year, a very different word from ano). The acute-accented á é í ó ú mark stress (La Habana has none, but Camagüey needs ü and Holguín needs í); ü tells you to pronounce the u after g. Questions and exclamations open with ¿ and ¡: ¿Qué bolá, asere? is the classic Cuban hello. For the whole alphabet see our Spanish collection.

On Windows hold Alt and type on the number pad 164 for ñ, 165 for Ñ, 160 á, 130 é, 161 í, 162 ó, 163 ú, 129 ü, 168 ¿ and 173 ¡. On a Mac press Option + N then N for ñ, Option + E then a vowel for á é í ó ú, Option + U then U for ü, Option + 1 for ¡ and Option + Shift + ? for ¿. On a phone, long-press N or a vowel.