Movimientos Migratorios: Migration Records Involving Cuba (1801–1951)

Search 16,658 profiles from Spain's Movimientos Migratorios portal that list Cuba as the place of departure or arrival: people licensed to sail from Spain to Cuba between 1801 and 1835, passengers on ships between Veracruz and Havana from the 1860s to 1890, foreigners who reached Mexico from Cuba between 1900 and 1951, and a small group who applied to live in the Dominican Republic between 1939 and 1941. Many profiles also name a parent, a spouse, children, other relatives or the people travelling with them, and each of those names can be searched. 7,067 profiles come with scans of the original documents.

PARES, the Portal de Archivos Españoles, is the Spanish Ministry of Culture's online portal to the country's archives. Its Movimientos Migratorios portal (the Ministry also calls it the Portal de Movimientos Migratorios Iberoamericanos) is coordinated by the Ministry's Subdirección General de los Archivos Estatales. It grew out of cooperation between Spanish and Latin American archives: the Archivo General de la Nación of Mexico, the Archivo General de la Nación of the Dominican Republic, the Archivo General de la Nación of Uruguay and the Fundación Complejo Cultural Parque de España in Rosario, Argentina. It gives free access to records of Spanish emigration to the Americas, and was updated in 2024 with support from the European Union's Creative Europe project "Archives and Traces of Migration".

The portal describes the people found in several series of documents. Each description is a ficha, a profile: the person's name as the document gives it, where they left from and where they arrived, the dates, and the archival reference of the document. Where the document has been digitised, the profile links to its scans, which are reproductions of the originals kept by the archive that holds them.

The selected profiles come from four series:

Licences to sail to Cuba (Expedientes sobre licencias de embarque. Isla de Cuba), Archivo General de Indias, Seville: 4,617 profiles, 1801 to 1835. People who asked the Crown's permission to go to Cuba, most of them to Havana, Santiago de Cuba or Matanzas. The files often name the applicant's parents, and sometimes a spouse, children, other relatives, or an employer already in Cuba. 4,455 of these profiles have scans, 80,213 pages in all.
Passenger lists of the Spanish consulate in Veracruz (Listas de pasajeros y emigrantes), Archivo General de la Administración: 9,286 profiles, most of them from the 1880s. Passengers on ships between Veracruz and Havana: 6,831 bound for Havana and 2,433 sailing from Havana to Veracruz. PARES showed no scans for these profiles when we saved them.
Mexico's National Register of Foreigners (Registro Nacional de Extranjeros en México): 2,726 profiles of people who reached Mexico from Cuba between 1900 and 1951, most of them in the 1940s. PARES shows the Archivo General de la Administración's digital copy of the register; the original cards are held by the Archivo General de la Nación of Mexico. 2,612 of these profiles have scans, 14,573 images in all.
Applications for residence in the Dominican Republic (Solicitudes de permiso de residencia en la República Dominicana): 29 profiles of people who went from Cuba to Santo Domingo between 1939 and 1941. PARES showed no scans for these profiles.

We saved the profiles and their scans from PARES on 11 and 12 October 2026.

The header and collection image is a historical photograph of a passenger steamer in Havana harbour. It shows the setting of these voyages; it is not a particular ship or traveler in these records.

Things to keep in mind

A profile describes a document, not a verified person or a completed journey. The same person can have more than one profile (a licence and a later file, two passenger lists), and a licence or a list records a request or a departure, not proof of arrival. We never join two profiles because their names match.
Profiles from the same document share its scans. PARES attaches the digitised file to every person it names in it, so as many as 182 profiles here show the same pages. Each record lists the other profiles that have the same scans.
The people a profile names are listed with the relationship PARES gives, from its "Personas relacionadas" section or its notes, together with the line that names them. Where PARES gives no relationship, none is added. Parents, spouses, children, cousins, business partners and the officials who handled a file can all be found by name.
Many travellers were accompanied by people the list does not name: "Esposa: NC", "Viaja con dos niños". Those mentions are kept on the record exactly as written, and no names are invented for them.
Names, places and notes are in Spanish, as PARES writes them. Dates follow PARES too: where PARES marks a date "(Aproximada)" or "(sic)", or writes SD or SM where the day or month would be, the record says so. A few profiles give dates that contradict each other; they are shown as PARES gives them, with a note.
Twelve scans of profile 54918 (Matías Bernabé de Sosa, ULTRAMAR,339,N.192) could not be saved: PARES lists them but returned empty images. The record shows where they belong and links to them on PARES.

Opening a profile on PARES

Every record links to its profile on PARES and, where there are scans, to the PARES image viewer. A profile's address ends in its number, the "nid", which each record here shows. For example, PARES profile 54918 opens the profile of Matías Bernabé de Sosa; on PARES, "Ver Imágenes" opens the scans. The portal itself is at PARES Movimientos Migratorios.

How to cite a record

PARES asks that its descriptions and images be cited with the Ministry of Culture, the archive, the reference of the document and the address of the profile. Each record gives that citation, for example:

MINISTERIO DE CULTURA, Archivo General de Indias, ULTRAMAR,339,N.192. Disponible en: https://pares.cultura.gob.es/MovimientosMigratorios/detalle.form?nid=54918 [consulta: 2026-10-11].

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