Cuba

Ninety days, extendable by another ninety, and then a further run of thirty-day extensions up to one year from the day you landed. That is longer than any other country in this set allows a visitor, and it comes from the regulation rather than from an officer's goodwill. A tourist visa is bought online, at a consulate, from an airline or a travel agency; an electronic one stays usable for a year from issue, a paper one for a hundred and eighty days. The list of nationalities that need no visa at all is the one thing Cuba does not publish: the law points at the visa-waiver agreements it has signed and never names them. Everything described here is the system that begins on 1 November 2026.

Cuba has no residence category for someone living on income from abroad. The resident classifications are a closed list of five, and the eleven subclassifications of temporary residence are all occupational - technician, student, artist, athlete, journalist, religious worker, trader, employee, investor, aid worker, accompanying family. None is a rentista, a pensioner or a person of independent means. What does exist runs through wealth rather than income: a foreigner with a significant patrimony abroad or in a Cuban bank may apply for permanent residence directly, and where the accounts are abroad the regulation requires the availability of a Cuban account holding a six-figure sum. That is a capital test, it leads to permanent residence rather than to a renewable temporary permit, and it passes through a year of provisional residence first.

Cuba has no pensioner or retirement residence category. The five resident classifications and the eleven subclassifications of temporary residence contain no route that turns on age, on a pension, or on retirement, and the grounds for permanent residence are family, length of prior residence, professional standing and wealth. Age enters Cuban residence law in exactly one place and it is not a route in: a permanent resident who reaches sixty stops having to renew, because from that age the classification runs indefinitely and the foreigner's identity card is issued without a new term.

A foreigner does not apply to work in Cuba. A Cuban legal person applies on their behalf, obtains the work permit from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security before the foreigner enters, and then asks the migration directorate for temporary residence. The permit belongs to the relationship, not to the person: lose the link with the body that sponsors you and the classification is cancelled and you must leave. Temporary residence runs for as long as the activity requires and may not exceed five years, renewable. Two classifications escape the permit entirely - provisional and permanent residents need no authorisation at all and are governed by the Labour Code like anyone else. A contract of ninety days or less needs no residence card: the visa is enough.

Cuba has an investor route at both levels, and neither of them is a price list. Temporary residence has a subclassification for investors and businesspeople, but it opens only once the project has been approved by the competent authority or by the relevant body of the Central State Administration - the approval comes first and the residence follows it. Permanent residence can be applied for on the ground of a patrimony allowing business or investment, and the regulation asks for a business or investment plan already approved by a sponsoring body, a bank certificate for the patrimony and the thousand-dollar guarantee deposit. No instrument we read sets a minimum amount to invest. The separate investor status announced in 2026 is not open to foreigners at all: it is for Cuban citizens living abroad.

A student is a temporary resident, not a separate category, and the regulation's definition splits students in two. One group arrives in the charge of a Cuban study, research or training centre under an exchange or co-operation programme; the other is admitted to study self-financed or on other paid terms. Both sit in the same subclassification, both are governed by the five-year ceiling on temporary residence, and both are applied for by the institution rather than by the student. One small benefit attaches to the status alone: foreign scholarship holders resident in Cuba import goods for their own use free of customs duty while they hold it.

Cuba has no residence category for the descendant of a Cuban, and it does not need one: descent is dealt with as citizenship rather than as immigration. A person born abroad is a Cuban citizen by birth if their birth is registered in the Cuban Civil Registry and they are the child of Cuban parents born in Cuba, or the grandchild of a Cuban born in Cuba where the parent is a Cuban by birth born abroad. That reaches two generations, which is further than most of the region's residence-by-descent routes reach. The residence side runs in the opposite direction: the only family-line ground for permanent residence is being the parent of a Cuban by birth, not the child or grandchild of one.

Marriage to a Cuban is the first ground listed for permanent residence, and the law puts an unregistered affective de facto union on the same footing provided it is recorded before a notary or recognised by a court and entered in the register. The Cuban partner must have effective residence in the country, which is a presence test rather than a matter of holding a Cuban passport. The ground also carries minor children and minor grandchildren of two foreign parents who belong to the applicant's family nucleus. It does not shorten the road: the applicant still passes through a year of provisional residence and still pays the thousand-dollar deposit, and marriage only shortens naturalisation, from five years of permanent residence to two.

Nothing in Cuban migration law gives a national of any country an easier residence on the strength of a treaty. The resident classifications are a closed list of five, and the subclassifications under them are occupational; none is a treaty category of the kind Mercosur, the Andean Community or CARICOM create elsewhere in the region. The only effect international agreements have on a foreigner's entry is the waiver of the visa, and the regulation is explicit that the waiver reaches the visa and nothing else: every other requirement for the classification still applies. Which countries hold such agreements is not published in any instrument we read.

Five years of permanent residence, or two for the spouse or parent of a Cuban by birth, and then a citizenship examination the law requires and no published instrument describes. The application opens with a notarial declaration of intention to become Cuban and is ratified by a second notarial act a year later, during which the authorities watch how the applicant is settling into the community where they intend to live. Two Cubans by birth who have been effectively resident for more than five years, who are not relatives and who have known the applicant for at least three years, must vouch for them before a notary. Acquiring another nationality does not cost a Cuban their citizenship, but inside Cuba the other one has no effect at all, and acts done there under a foreign nationality are void without any process to annul them.

Cuba does not count your days. The personal income tax law divides taxpayers by migration status, not by presence: a foreigner with permanent residence in the national territory is taxed on income whatever country it came from, and a foreigner without it is taxed only on income obtained or generated in Cuba, at a flat fifteen per cent on the gross with no deduction of any kind and no annual return. There is no hundred-and-eighty-three-day rule in the statute, no centre-of-vital-interests test, and no definition of permanent residence in the tax law's own glossary: the term is the migration law's and the tax law borrows it whole. The practical consequence is unusual. Worldwide taxation in Cuba is something you apply for, wait a year for and pay a thousand dollars towards, rather than something that happens to you by staying too long.

What the migration instruments show is that a Cuban bank account is not optional for anyone settling here: it is a condition of the status. A provisional resident must hold a bank account in the country operated regularly, among the seven things that make up suitable conduct and social insertion. An applicant for permanent residence must place a non-refundable thousand-dollar guarantee deposit at a Cuban bank branch, for themselves and for each accompanying foreigner. An applicant relying on wealth held abroad must show the availability of an account in Cuba of not less than six figures. And an account operated regularly is one of the acts that can establish effective migratory residence for someone short of the day count. What the instruments do not say is how a foreigner opens one, and we did not read the Banco Central de Cuba's rules.

The Constitution makes public health a right of all persons and makes the State responsible for guaranteeing access, free of charge and of quality, and it says persons rather than citizens. The migration and foreigners laws then build on that. A provisional or permanent resident is placed on the same footing as a Cuban in rights and duties, with no exception for health; provisional and humanitarian residents are expressly given similar rights to health, work, social security, education, justice and family reunification as permanent residents. A non-resident foreigner is placed on the same footing as a resident in access to health, but the law adds the words that matter - in accordance with what the relevant legislation establishes - and that legislation we have not read. A provisional resident is separately required to hold contracted medical insurance.

Six months on your own licence, and then a Cuban one issued without any test at all. The Road Safety Code lets a foreigner, or a Cuban permanently resident abroad, who is temporarily in Cuba drive categories A, A1 and B for a non-extendable six months from the date of entry, on a licence valid for those vehicles in their country of residence. Past six months the national licence becomes necessary, and the Code says in terms that it may be obtained on payment of the document tax without sitting any examination. That is the opposite of the ordinary route, where an applicant takes a medical, a theory test and a practical test. The six months runs from entry rather than from the start of residence, and it cannot be extended.

Household goods and personal effects of a person arriving in Cuba to reside permanently are exempt from customs duty, and so are the used personal objects any passenger carries. Everything else runs into two low ceilings that apply to everyone: a shipment may not exceed two hundred United States dollars in value and a passenger's accompanied baggage may not exceed a thousand. Exceeding either is not an excess-duty situation; the tariff makes it a ground for administrative confiscation, with an option to formalise the goods as a commercial import instead. Duty is calculated ad valorem on a value in United States dollars and paid in Cuban pesos, and for mixed consumer goods the customs service values by weight rather than by invoice.