Annotated Checklist of the Amphibians and Reptiles of Cuba

The study of the Cuban herpetofauna has a long history. Ramón de la Sagra compiled the first comprehensive account of the natural history of the island in the mid-nineteenth century (1838–1861), and Juan Gundlach and Wilhelm Peters described several of the first species during the colonial era. By the end of the nineteenth century only ten species of amphibians were known from Cuba, and the pace of discovery accelerated during the twentieth century with the contributions of Albert Schwartz and more recently those of Alberto R. Estrada, S. Blair Hedges and Luis M. Díaz, among others (Díaz et al., 2023). The taxonomic literature on the Cuban herpetofauna includes classical and more recent compilations such as those of Barbour and Ramsden (1919), Schwartz and Henderson (1991), Díaz and Cádiz (2008), Rodríguez Schettino et al. (2013), Rivalta et al. (2014), Torres López et al. (2017), and continues today with the continuously updated online herpetological databases such as Caribherp (Hedges, 2026), The Reptile Database (Uetz et al., 2026), AmphibiaWeb (AmphibiaWeb, 2026), and Amphibian Species of the World (Frost, 2026). This checklist updates and complements these works, cataloguing 73 species of amphibians (69 native and four introduced) and 169 species of reptiles (159 native and ten introduced), plus 158 subspecies (seven amphibians and 151 reptiles). Of the 228 native species, 205 (89.9%) are endemic to the Cuban Archipelago. We provide standardized English and Spanish common names, conservation status, abundance, and habitat associations, with the aim of facilitating the identification and study of the herpetofauna of the largest island in the West Indies.