Beer reached Cuba long before anyone brewed it there: first smuggled in from Jamaica, then imported legally after the British took Havana in 1762, with English ales and Tennent's Lager in the lead. It is often said that Cuban brewing began in 1841, when Juan Manuel Asbert and Calixto García opened a brewery in Havana and tried to use sugar-cane juice instead of barley, but no source confirms it. A works at Cárdenas opened in 1883 and did not last. Local brewing took hold only in 1888, when higher import duties made it worth the effort.

The first lasting brewery was La Tropical at Puentes Grandes in Havana, owned by the Nueva Fábrica de Hielo S.A., an ice company founded in 1888 by the Herrera family from Cantabria (accounts differ on whether it bought the brewery in 1896 or the land in 1900). Brewmasters came from France and Germany, and around 1909-10 the company took over the Tívoli brewery at Palatino, built in 1905 by the American-owned Havana Brewery. Cristal Palatino, a pale lager, went on sale on 3 June 1928 and the dark La Tropical 50 on 1 May 1938. La Tropical won a Grand Prix at Paris in 1912, and in 1958 its brands made almost 60 percent of Cuba's beer.

In Santiago de Cuba the Bacardí rum company bought the defunct Santiago Brewing Company of the engineer Eduardo Chibás between 1918 and 1920 (the sources differ) and brewed the first Hatuey in 1926-27 under a German brewmaster. The beer, named after the Indigenous resistance leader, held about half of the market, with over 12 million cases sold in 1959. Bacardí opened the Cervecería Modelo at El Cotorro near Havana on 22 July 1948 and a third plant, Cervecería Central, at Manacas in 1953. In 1947 the breweries made 81.4 million litres, too little for demand, and 428,000 cases of 24 bottles were imported.

The breweries were nationalised in 1960; the owners of La Tropical were told on 13 October. With East German help two big plants were built: Tínima at Camagüey, whose first cases were filled on 16 December 1985, and the works at Holguín, opened on 24 October 1990. In May 1997 the Holguín works became Cervecería Bucanero S.A., a joint venture of the state holding Corporación Alimentaria and Cerbuco Brewing, then Interbrew's Canadian arm. In 2000 a press report counted six breweries, in Havana (Cristal, Tropical, Polar and Modelo beers), Manacas, Camagüey, Holguín and Santiago, refitted in 1997-98 for more than 8 million dollars. Cristal now comes from Holguín; the old La Tropical works, which brewed until the late 2000s, stands disused. Bacardí brewed Hatuey in the United States from 1995 and relaunched it as a small-batch beer in 2011, and La Tropical came back in Miami in May 2016.

Bucanero, with Cristal, Bucanero, Bucanero Max, Mayabe and Cacique, is the main brewer; Coralsa and Cerbuco, a subsidiary of Ambev and so of AB InBev, own 50 percent each. In June 2024 it started a new line for 30-litre kegs and aims to pass 1.8 million hectolitres before 2032. Cervecería Cubana S.A. in the Mariel Special Development Zone, formed in 2019 by Cuba Ron and Swinkels Family Brewers (Bavaria, Holandia) with 100 million dollars and a first capacity of one million hectolitres, launched the Parranda pilsner in PET bottles on 19 July 2023. In April 2026 a press report showed rusting, overgrown tanks that commenters identified as the Tínima works. In Old Havana a brewery on Plaza Vieja was working by January 2014, and a harbour brewery with Austrian equipment and three brewmasters opened in the old Tobacco and Wood warehouse in March 2014.