Passengers from Santander, Spain to Cuba (1846–1960)

Search 32,598 people who left the port of Santander, Spain, bound for Cuba. Most sailed on the Compañía Trasatlántica Española between 1900 and 1960, and each of those entries gives the date the ship sailed, the ship, and the Cuban port it was bound for, with a link to the page of the scanned ship book. An earlier group, from 1846 to 1867, are Cantabrians who applied for a passport to travel to Cuba; those entries give the applicant's hometown instead of a ship.

Havana accounts for most of the entries. The rest were bound for Santiago de Cuba, Matanzas, Cienfuegos, Cárdenas, Gibara, Nuevitas, Pinar del Río, Trinidad, Puerto Príncipe (Camagüey), or simply "Cuba". A few ships were listed as sailing to Havana and Mexico, or to Veracruz and Havana, and those passengers are included too.

About the source

Pérez y Cía was a Santander shipping firm founded in 1853 by Ángel Bernardo Pérez. It owned and managed ships, acted as consignee for other lines, helped found the Compañía Trasatlántica Española in 1881, and handled transatlantic passenger traffic out of Santander until the 1960s. Its archive is held by the Biblioteca de la Universidad de Cantabria.

The Trasatlántica ticket books in that archive list the passengers on the line's routes to the Americas, with the ship, the sailing date, the destination, the class of passage and the fare paid. The university digitized the books and transcribed more than 45,000 names into a passenger search. This collection brings together every entry in that search with a Cuban destination, collected on 1 October 2026.

Things to keep in mind

There are gaps in the years. The library notes that no books survive for roughly 1911 to 1916 and 1931 to 1945.
Women, children and servants were often not named. They may appear only as part of the head of the family's entry, for example "Guillermo Fernández Calzada, señora y un sobrino de 3 años". That is why the passenger count in our index of the books (33,643 people bound for Cuba between 1900 and 1960) is higher than the number of named entries here.
Surnames can be misspelled, either in the original books or in the transcription, and spellings changed over time (Yzaguirre/Izaguirre, Rivera/Ribera, Cajigas/Cagigas). Try more than one spelling.
Entries recorded only as "Trinidad" or "Puerto Príncipe" are most likely Trinidad and Camagüey in Cuba, but the same names were used for the island of Trinidad and for Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Those records say so.
Open the ship book page linked from each sailing. The scan can show what the index leaves out, such as the class of travel, the fare, and family members travelling with the passenger.

The ship books

The nine books as the Universidad de Cantabria scanned them, each a PDF of about 300 to 400 pages. Every sailing in the collection also links straight to its own page.

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