The Cuban iguana is distributed throughout the mainland of Cuba and its surrounding islets with a feral population thriving on Isla Magueyes, Puerto Rico.

This species was first introduced to scientific literature by British zoologist Edward Griffith in his rather rewritten translation of George Cuvier's Le Règne Animal, in 1831.

[4] In Cuvier's actual Le Règne Animal (from the second edition onwards) he describes an Iguana cychlura,[5] but Griffith doesn't mention this at all in his 'translation',[3] and Gray dismisses the taxon as unclear in his Synopsis.

[7] The French herpetologists Auguste Henri André Duméril and Gabriel Bibron state in 1837 that where some authors might believe that there were nine or ten species of Cyclura, as far as they could tell there were only three (of which two are now classified in Ctenosaura).

They classify all the Cyclura of the Turks and Caicos Islands (C. carinata was believed to occur in the Carolinas at the time), the Bahamas, and Cuba as the species C. harlani.

[9] George Albert Boulenger, working with the same British Museum collection of specimens four decades later, in 1885, instead interpreted C. carinata as monotypic, the only species to inhabit the Bahamas, Cuba and the Turks and Caicos, considering all the other previously named taxa synonyms.

[10] Herpetologists and taxonomists Thomas Barbour and Gladwyn Kingsley Noble first described the Lesser Caymans iguana as a species in 1916, C. caymanensis.

In this work they renamed Cuban iguanas from C. nubila to the misspelled junior synonym C. macleayi, giving as the reason that because the holotype was somewhere in London and not in the US, they hadn't examined it, and furthermore found that Gray's scientific description was worthless.

His own research into the scalation patterns on the heads (such patterns are often unique to a particular species and can act as a "fingerprint" of sorts) of the four taxa from the Bahamas, Cuba and Cayman Islands, found that although the Bahamas specimens were distinguishable by the presence of a single large canthal scale which had merged from three smaller ones, the three subspecies of C. nubila could not be diagnostically separated by head scales.

During the heights of the Ice Ages they would have been much larger and closer to Cuba, although the Lesser Islands and Grand Cayman were always separated by a deep channel.

[citation needed] On rare occasions, individual males with lengths of 1.6 meters (5.2 ft) when measured from the snout to the tip of the tail have been recorded at the wildlife sanctuary within the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base with females being two thirds that size.

Young animals tend to be dark brown or green with faint darker striping or mottling in five to ten diagonal transverse bands on the body.

[20] Cuban iguanas occasionally consume animal matter, and individuals have been observed scavenging the corpses of birds, fish and crabs.

[25] Researchers on Isla Magueyes observed a single episode of cannibalism in 2006 when an adult female iguana chased, caught, and ate a hatchling.

She stood near it for weeks, defending it by shaking her head and hissing at anyone who approached; this behavior demonstrated that Cuban iguanas guard their nest sites.

[23] Although Cuban iguanas typically remain still for long periods of time and have a slow lumbering gait due to their body mass, they are capable of quick bursts of speed for short distances.

[19] According to Allison Alberts, an ecologist at the San Diego Zoo, among the many wildlife species at the base, "the Cuban iguana is one of the largest, undoubtedly the most visible, and certainly the most charismatic.

[30] An unusual incident occurred when a detainee in the prison assaulted a guard with a bloody tail torn from a Cuban iguana in 2005.

[20][33] In the mid-1960s a small group of Cuban iguanas was released from a zoo on Isla Magueyes, southwest of Puerto Rico, forming an independent free-ranging feral population.

[36] Many zoological parks and private individuals keep them in captive breeding programs, minimizing the demand for wild-caught specimens for the pet trade.

In the fall of 2003, attorney Tom Wilner needed to persuade the justices of the US Supreme Court to take the case of a dozen Kuwaiti detainees being held in isolation in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without charges, without a hearing and without access to a lawyer.

[39][40] Wilner argued, "anyone, including a federal official, who violates the Endangered Species Act by harming an iguana at Guantanamo, can be fined and prosecuted.

According to naturalist Thomas Barbour in 1946, this was based on superstitious beliefs which suggest that the iguanas emit a dark fluid reminiscent of the black vomit of yellow fever victims when they are killed.

The purpose was not only to help the Cuban iguana population, but to test the overall effectiveness of headstarting as a conservation strategy for more critically endangered species of Cyclura.

[44] The strategy proved successful, according to Alberts, when the released head-started iguanas reacted to predators, foraged for food, and behaved like their wild-born counterparts.