Havana Trivia
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49 free Havana trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Havana was founded three times before it stuck. Diego Velázquez put it on a swampy south coast in 1514, the settlers tried again by the Almendares River, and only in 1519 did the town settle beside the deep harbour that made it Spain's key to the New World. This quiz follows the story from there: the French corsair who burned the town in 1555, the walls and castles that followed, the 1762 British siege that was traded for Florida, the first railway in Latin America, the USS Maine and the 1902 republic, and the revolution that turned the Habana Hilton into Fidel Castro's headquarters. It also walks the modern city: the 8 km Malecón, El Capitolio and the diamond under its dome, the Hotel Nacional and its 1946 mob summit, Hemingway's Finca Vigía and his fisherman from Cojímar, Buena Vista Social Club, Havana Club rum, Industriales baseball, the 2019 tornado and Camila Cabello's 'Havana'. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Havana and its landmarks, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Cuba quiz next if you want the rest of the island.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who became the first sitting US president to visit Havana since Calvin Coolidge in 1928?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama landed in March 2016 during the thaw in relations and toured Old Havana on foot with his family through a downpour, cheered by crowds who braved the rain to see him.
Q 02Which city did Havana replace as the seat of Cuba's colonial governors in the 16th century?
Santiago
Santiago de Cuba lost out because Havana's deep, sheltered harbour became the gathering point for treasure fleets sailing home to Spain, and the governors followed the ships.
Q 03Which founding name, honouring the patron saint of travellers, did Havana first carry?
San Cristóbal de la Habana
San Cristóbal de la Habana honours Saint Christopher, still the city's patron; tradition dates its first mass, under a ceiba tree, to 16 November 1519, kept as Havana's birthday.
Q 04One theory traces the name 'Habana' to Habaguanex, who was what?
A Taíno chief
Habaguanex was a Taíno chief, or cacique, said to have controlled the region when the Spanish arrived; little else is recorded of him, so the derivation stays a theory.
Q 05Locals write 'La Habana' with a b, so where did English get its 'v' spelling?
From older Spanish usage
From older Spanish usage: for over two centuries Spanish documents wrote Havana or Hauana, and 'Habana' only became standard around 1821, after English had settled on the v.
Q 06Where on Cuba do historians believe Havana was first founded, before it moved to its present bay?
On the island's south coast
On the island's south coast, near today's Batabanó, is where historians place the first Havana, though no trace of it has been found; its swampy site was abandoned and the town moved north, probably for the better harbour.
Q 07What did French corsair Jacques de Sores do to Havana in 1555?
Burned it
Burned it: the Huguenot corsair seized lightly defended Havana, came away with far less than he had hoped for and torched it; within three years Spain had begun the stone castle of La Real Fuerza to guard the port.
Q 08Which king granted Havana the title of City in 1592?
Philip II
Philip II raised Havana from town to city in 1592, recognising the port's role as assembly point of the treasure fleets.
Q 09A 1649 epidemic that killed about a third of Havana's people is believed to have been which disease?
Yellow fever
Yellow fever, thought to have come by ship from Cartagena, raged from May to October; in 1881 Carlos Finlay told Havana's Academy of Sciences that mosquitoes spread it, and was doubted for two decades.
Q 10Which British rock band played a free open-air concert to a vast Havana crowd in March 2016?
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones played free to hundreds of thousands at the Ciudad Deportiva sports ground on 25 March 2016; decades earlier their records had been banned in Cuba as ideologically suspect.
Q 11Which power captured Havana in a 1762 siege during the Seven Years' War?
Britain
Britain took the city after mining and storming the Morro castle; during eleven months of occupation it threw Havana open to trade with its own colonies.
Q 12Under the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Spain got Havana back in exchange for what?
Florida
Florida was the price: Spain ceded it to recover Havana after eleven months in enemy hands, then began the huge La Cabaña fortress that same year so the city could not be taken that way again.
Q 13Whose remains were moved to Havana in 1796 and stayed until 1898?
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus's remains went from Santo Domingo to Havana's cathedral in 1796 and on to Seville in 1898; DNA tests in 2006 backed the Seville bones, though Dominican officials insisted he had never left.
Q 21What does the 20-metre white marble statue unveiled on a hill above Havana's harbour in 1958 depict?
Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ: Cuban sculptor Jilma Madera carved the Christ of Havana from Carrara marble blessed by Pope Pius XII, and it was unveiled at Christmas, about a week before the revolution toppled Batista.
Q 22What rare disaster struck eastern Havana in January 2019?
An EF4 tornado
An EF4 tornado tore through Regla, Guanabacoa and Diez de Octubre on the night of 27 January 2019, killing several people; one resident said it sounded like an aeroplane falling out of the sky.
Q 23Which Havana neighbourhood is the city's financial district and home to the University of Havana?
Vedado
Q 14Its new theatres and columned mansions earned 19th-century Havana which nickname?
Paris of the Antilles
Paris of the Antilles: once Spain's trade monopoly ended, the port boomed, shops stocked the latest fashions, theatres booked the star actors of the day and the newly rich built mansions fronted with columns.
Q 15The sinking of which US battleship in Havana Harbor triggered the Spanish–American War?
USS Maine
USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor on 15 February 1898, killing more than 260 men; 'Remember the Maine' fuelled the push for war, though what caused the blast was never settled.
Q 16Havana-born José Raúl Capablanca won a world championship in his home city in 1921 in which game?
Chess
Chess: Capablanca, who said he learned the game at four by watching his father play, took the world title from Emanuel Lasker in Havana in 1921 without losing a single game.
Q 17Which Havana-born singer, famous for her shout of ¡Azúcar!, became known around the world as the Queen of Salsa?
Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz grew up in Havana's poor Santos Suárez district and made her name with the Sonora Matancera orchestra; after she left for the United States she was barred from ever returning to Cuba.
Q 18UNESCO's 1982 listing of Old Havana also covers what?
Its fortifications
Its fortifications: UNESCO listed Old Havana and the ring of Spanish forts that guarded it in 1982, and city historian Eusebio Leal then led the restoration of the colonial core until his death in 2020.
Q 19Which Havana-born ballerina danced on for decades despite losing most of her sight and founded what became Cuba's National Ballet?
Alicia Alonso
Alicia Alonso lost her peripheral vision to detached retinas in her twenties, yet kept dancing Giselle with stage lights and her partners' whispers to guide her; she died in 2019 aged 98.
Q 20Which river crosses Havana from south to north before reaching the sea a few miles west of the bay?
Almendares
Almendares: the island's first people called it Casiguaguas, and an early Havana stood at its mouth, La Chorrera, before the settlers moved on to the bay; the little stone fort of La Chorrera marks the spot.
Vedado means 'forbidden': for centuries building was banned on this stretch of coast so that raiders would find no road into the city; it was laid out on a grid from the 1850s and got its hotel towers a century later.
Q 24Whose face, outlined in steel, covers the Interior Ministry building overlooking Havana's Plaza de la Revolución?
Che Guevara
Che Guevara's outline carries his slogan 'Hasta la Victoria Siempre', ever onward to victory; since 2009 a matching steel portrait of fellow commander Camilo Cienfuegos has covered the ministry next door.
Q 25Havana's international airport is named after which figure?
José Martí
José Martí International Airport, in the Boyeros municipality south-west of the centre, honours the poet and independence hero who died in battle in 1895; it is Cubana de Aviación's hub.
Q 26Who made the brand-new Havana Hilton his headquarters in 1959, before it was renamed the Habana Libre?
Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro ran his new government from the Continental Suite, room 2324, after his column entered Havana in January 1959; the tower had opened only the previous March and was nationalised and renamed in 1960.
Q 27Which giant state ice-cream parlour opened in Havana in 1966?
Coppelia
Coppelia, the state ice-cream parlour opened in 1966 at the top of La Rampa, serves thousands of customers daily from its circular pavilion and appears in the 1993 film Strawberry and Chocolate.
Q 28The Bacardi Building, finished in 1930, is a celebrated example of which style?
Art Deco
Art Deco: the rum firm's 1930 tower climbs in steps to a bat, the Bacardi emblem, and the bat has stayed on Havana's skyline even though the company lost its Cuban assets in 1960 and left the island.
Q 29Which novelist wrote the 1958 spy comedy Our Man in Havana, about a vacuum-cleaner salesman turned bogus secret agent?
Graham Greene
Graham Greene has his hard-up salesman invent a whole spy ring and send London drawings of vacuum-cleaner parts as secret intelligence; the novel came out in October 1958, weeks before Batista's Havana fell.
Q 30The Havana team Industriales plays which sport?
Baseball
Baseball: Industriales, the Blue Lions, were formed after the revolution scrapped Cuba's professional leagues in favour of the amateur National Series, and they won the title in their debut season of 1962–63.