Cuba vs Mexico

Mexico is 18 times larger than Cuba — 1,964,375 against 110,860 km². Mexico is 12 times more populous than Cuba — 131,946,900 against 10,937,203 people.

Side by side

Population density

Cuba is 1.5 times more densely populated than Mexico — 99 against 67 people per km². Density is where area and population interact, and it often reverses the impression the headline figures give — a large country with a small population can feel emptier than a small crowded one by an enormous margin.

Practical differences

• Different currencies: the Cuban peso and the Mexican peso.
• Mexico spans 4 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.

Cuba

The largest island in the Caribbean, roughly 1,250 km long but as little as 31 km wide. The Viñales valley in the west is a karst landscape of mogotes — steep limestone humps left standing when the rock around them dissolved. The bee hummingbird, the smallest bird in the world at about 5 cm, lives only here.

Mexico

Mexico has the fourth-highest count of vertebrate and plant species of any country, and more reptile species than anywhere else. Chicxulub, under the northern Yucatán, is the roughly 180 km crater left by the asteroid impact 66 million years ago. The Sistema Sac Actun beneath the same peninsula is the longest known underwater cave system in the world, over 370 km surveyed.

Neutral facts only. Nothing here addresses politics, government, economics or which country is preferable in any respect — population is the one figure that dates, and it carries its year.