Why Doesn’t Cuba Have McDonald’s? (2026)

This one started as a research question for bigmacindex.app and ended up being one of the weirder geopolitical footnotes I’ve come across. Cuba both has and does not have a McDonald’s. Technically there is exactly one. Practically speaking, almost no Cuban citizen can eat there. The reasons are a 65-year-old trade embargo and a 1903 lease.

The short answer

The US trade embargo against Cuba, in effect since 1960, prohibits American companies from operating commercial businesses on the island. As a result, McDonald’s has never opened a public-facing restaurant in Cuba. The single exception is a McDonald’s inside the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, opened in 1986 under a 1903 territorial lease that grants the US “complete jurisdiction and control” over the base. That restaurant is operated by the Department of the Navy and is accessible only to base-authorized personnel — military members, civilian contractors, and their families. Ordinary Cubans cannot enter. For PPP purposes, Cuba is effectively a McDonald’s-free country and is not tracked in The Economist’s Big Mac Index.

The 1960 embargo and what it actually blocks

The United States imposed its first commercial embargo on Cuba in 1960 after the Cuban government nationalised US-owned properties. The embargo has been progressively tightened across multiple administrations and remains the most enduring US trade embargo in modern history (Wikipedia: United States embargo against Cuba; US State Department: Cuba Sanctions).

For McDonald’s specifically, the embargo creates three blockers:

US-headquartered companies cannot operate commercial subsidiaries in Cuba without specific licenses from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which are rarely granted for consumer-facing fast food.
Supply chains cannot move freely. Even a McDonald’s franchisee would struggle to legally import the standardised inputs (specific beef cuts, specific buns, specific paper goods) that McDonald’s global operations require.
Payment infrastructure. US-dollar settlement, which most international franchises use, runs into restrictions when one counterparty is Cuban.

The result: McDonald’s has never opened a Havana, Santiago, or Varadero location, and probably will not for the foreseeable future. Other US chains — Starbucks, KFC, Burger King, Subway — also have no Cuban presence.

The Guantánamo exception

Inside the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay there is one McDonald’s, opened in 1986. The base sits on roughly 116 km² of southeastern Cuban coastline that the US has leased since the 1903 Cuban-American Treaty. The lease gives the United States “complete jurisdiction and control” over the area, which is the legal hook that allows US commercial entities (including McDonald’s, a Subway, a KFC, and a small Pizza Hut) to operate there (Wikipedia: Guantanamo Bay Naval Base; Guantánamo Public Memory Project).

In practice this means:

The McDonald’s exists on Cuban soil.
It is the only McDonald’s on the entire island.
You cannot eat there without base access (active military, retired military with privileges, civilian contractors, dependents, certain authorised visitors).
The Cuban government does not regulate or recognise it as operating in Cuba.

CNN included it in their 2014 round-up of “weird places to find the golden arches” and the description holds up over a decade later (CNN, 2014; Mashed: Cuba’s Only McDonald’s).

What Cubans actually eat: El Rápido, paladares, and CUP pricing

For Cuban consumers in Havana and beyond, the fast-food substitute is a state-run chain called El Rápido, launched in 1991. It serves hamburgers, hot dogs, fries, and soft drinks at prices set in Cuban pesos (CUP), with the explicit goal of making convenience food accessible to working Cubans on local salaries (bestcubaguide.com: El Rápido; historytools.org: Does Cuba Have McDonald’s).

Alongside El Rápido, since 2011 the Cuban government has allowed paladares — privately-run restaurants — which now compete with state-run operations in tourist-heavy areas. Paladar burger prices in Havana commonly land in the $3–6 USD-equivalent range when converted from CUP at informal market rates, though Cuba’s dual-currency history makes any single PPP estimate fragile.

[TODO: pull a recent (2025–2026) El Rápido hamburger price in CUP and convert at both the official and informal market rates to bracket the PPP estimate.]

What this means for PPP

Cuba is structurally hard to fit into a Big Mac Index framework for three layered reasons:

No McDonald’s product to price outside the inaccessible Guantánamo restaurant.
Multiple parallel exchange rates mean any single USD conversion is contested. The official CUP-to-USD rate is set by the government; the informal market rate can differ by an order of magnitude.
Subsidised pricing. State-run El Rápido prices reflect a planned-economy goal of accessibility, not a market-clearing input cost — which is the whole premise the Big Mac Index relies on.

For bigmacindex.app, Cuba sits in the same bucket as Iran (Iran writeup →) and North Korea: structurally unreachable under the strict Big Mac methodology, but worth a separate “shadow PPP” estimate using local state-chain prices. I write more about how I handle these edge cases on the methodology page.

The cleanest pattern-similar case is Bolivia, which is a democratic country that McDonald’s exited and never returned to (Bolivia writeup →). The least similar is Russia, where McDonald’s had 850+ locations until 2022 and where shadow data (Vkusno i tochka) is rich (Russia writeup →).

Sources used in this article

Want to see where McDonald’s is? Big Mac Index data → · Methodology → · Spot a mistake? Email me at [email protected].