RELIGION

The Roman Catholic Church is the predominant religion. It arrived to Cuba with Christopher Columbus caravels and during almost five centuries maintained its hegemony as the official religion of the colonial regime. Later on, it was also the predominant religion of the Republic, from 1902 to 1959.

Nowadays, although it is the strongest due to its bonds with tradition and culture, shares the space with evangelical churches that first came to the island in 1899, when the north American troops occupied the country.

Hundreds of temples and cult houses were erected all along the country. Among them, Baptist, Episcopal, Methodist and Presbyterian churches, as well as other denominations of Protestantism.

In almost all Cuban municipalities there are parishes and catholic chapels that are distributed in eleven dioceses. The current archbishop of Havana is member of the Sacred School of Cardinals.

Catholicism and Christianity have in Cuba a distinctive feature. From the 16 th century the African slaves, when being evangelized, mixed the forms of their religious conscience with the dogmas and the catholic liturgy.

The Yoruba deities and other African cultures mixed with the catholic saints in a phenomenon called syncretism, that still exists and characterizes a considerable portion of the inhabitants of the island in the practice of cults and rules of which, the Santeria is one of the most spread.

There are also Jewish and Muslims.