Little is known of its behaviour, but it is reported to have nested in hollow trees, lived in pairs or families, and fed on seeds and fruits.

Early explorers of Cuba, such as Christopher Columbus and Diego Álvarez Chanca, mentioned macaws there in 15th- and 16th-century writings.

[3] Bechstein's description was based on the bird's entry in the French naturalist François Le Vaillant's 1801 book Histoire Naturelle des Perroquets.

Several were provided by the Cuban naturalist Juan Gundlach, who collected some of the last individuals that regularly fed near the Zapata Swamp in 1849–50.

[7] No modern skeletal remains of this macaw are known, but three subfossil specimens have been discovered: half a carpometacarpus from a possibly Pleistocene spring deposit in Ciego Montero, identified by extrapolating from the size of Cuban macaw skins and bones of extant macaws (reported in 1928), a rostrum from a Quaternary cave deposit in Caimito (reported in 1984), and a worn skull from Sagua La Grande, which was deposited in a waterfilled sinkhole possibly during the Quaternary and associated with various extinct birds and ground sloths (reported in 2008).

[2] The Jamaican red macaw (Ara gossei) was named by the British zoologist Walter Rothschild in 1905 on the basis of a description of a specimen shot in 1765.

[10][12] Rothschild's 1907 book Extinct Birds included a depiction of a specimen in the Liverpool Museum which was presented as a Cuban macaw.

[2] The name Ara tricolor haitius was coined for a supposed subspecies from Hispaniola by the German ornithologist Dieter Hoppe in 1983, but is now considered to have been based on erroneous records.

[14] In 1985, the American ornithologist David Wetherbee suggested that extant specimens had been collected from both Cuba and Hispaniola, and that the two populations represented distinct species, differing in details of their colouration.

Whetherbee stated the name Ara tricolor instead applied to the supposed Hispaniolan species, as he believed Cuba had no bird collectors prior to 1822, and that the illustration and description published by Le Vaillant were based on a specimen collected during a 1798 expedition to Hispaniola.

[15] The idea that the name Ara tricolor applied to a Hispaniolan species had gained acceptance by 1989, but in 1995, the British ornithologist Michael Walters pointed out that birds had indeed been described from Cuba prior to 1822, that the supposed differences in colouration were of no importance, and that the basis of Wetherbee's argument was therefore invalid.

Johansson and colleagues estimated that the Cuban macaw had diverged from its mainland relatives around 4 million years ago, during the early Pliocene.

[7][8] The American zoologist Austin Hobart Clark reported that juvenile Cuban macaws were green, though he did not provide any source for this claim.

[2] The skull roof of the subfossil cranium was flattened, indicating the Cuban macaw fed on hard seeds, especially from palms.

[2] In 2005, a new species of chewing louse, Psittacobrosus bechsteini, was described based on a dead specimen discovered on a museum skin of the Cuban macaw.

[14] The feather mite species Genoprotolichus eurycnemis and Distigmesikya extincta have also been reported from Cuban macaw skins, the latter new to science.

[2] The range of the Cuban macaw's distribution at the time of European settlement on the main island of Cuba is unclear, but the species was reportedly becoming rare by the mid-19th century.

Most accounts from the 19th century are based on Gundlach's reports from the immense Zapata Swamp, where the species was somewhat common near the northern edge.

[2] The habitat of the Cuban macaw was open savanna terrain with scattered trees, typical of the Zapata Swamp area.

It was killed for food; the Italian traveler Gemelli Careri found the meat tasty, but Gundlach considered it tough.

Furthermore, collectors caught young birds by observing adults and felling the trees in which they nested, although sometimes nestlings were accidentally killed.

However, given the species' precarious position, it may have resulted in fragmented habitat and caused them to seek food in areas where they were more vulnerable to hunting.

Gundlach's sightings in the Zapata Swamp in the 1850s and Zappey's second-hand report of a pair on Isla de la Juventud in 1864 are the last reliable accounts.

[2] In 1886, Gundlach reported that he believed birds persisted in southern Cuba, which led Greenway to suggest that the species survived until 1885.

[2][22] According to the British writer Errol Fuller, aviculturalists are rumoured to have bred birds similar in appearance to the Cuban macaw.