Islam's first appearance in Cuba came centuries before the Abdallah Mosque: between 1808 and 1848, tens of thousands of enslaved West Africans, many of them Muslim Mandingo people from Senegambia, were brought to the island, though their practice of the faith was suppressed and largely did not survive intact. The Muslim community that exists in Cuba today is essentially a modern one — most of the roughly 5,000 Muslims present before 1959 emigrated after the revolution, and the state's decades of official atheism left little space for public worship until the government eased its stance in the 1990s.
Since then the community has rebuilt itself almost entirely through conversion: by the mid-2010s, estimates put Cuba's Muslim population at around 10,000, the large majority of them converts rather than descendants of earlier Muslim arrivals. Havana's mosque, funded in part by Gulf donors, opened in Old Havana to serve this newer, home-grown congregation, and remains the country's main center for organized daily and Friday prayers.
Cuba's Muslim organizations coordinate closely with North American da'wah and relief networks that supported the community's growth after the 1990s, so the Islamic Society of North America's angles are the standard reference here; at Havana's latitude of roughly 23°N, they give a Fajr twilight that stays clearly separated from sunrise across the year.
Through the transatlantic slave trade — between 1808 and 1848 the island received a very large share of the enslaved Muslims brought to the Americas, most of them Mandingo people from Senegambia, though sustained religious practice did not survive the colonial period.
Not directly — most of Cuba's roughly 5,000 pre-1959 Muslims left after the revolution, so the present-day community of around 10,000 is overwhelmingly made up of Cuban converts rather than descendants of the earlier enslaved population.
The Abdallah Mosque in Old Havana is the country's main mosque, open for all five daily prayers as well as Friday congregational prayer, and serves as the anchor institution for Cuba's small but active Muslim community.
No — for decades official state atheism discouraged open religious practice of any kind, and it was only from the 1990s onward that the government grew more accepting of mosques, Islamic organizations and public worship.