Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. United States currently owes about 2216.8× more — a gap of $39.88 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.
By total government debt, Cuba ranks 98th-largest and United States ranks 1st-largest among the 137 sovereigns tracked on this site.
On a per-citizen basis the picture can look different from the nominal totals: a resident's notional share of the national debt in United States is roughly 73.9× that in Cuba ($118,739 vs $1,607 per person).
Both countries carry debt-to-GDP ratios above the 100% mark that analysts often treat as an informal threshold for closer scrutiny — Cuba at 120% and United States at 124% — meaning each owes more than a full year's worth of national output.
The gap between them is widening: United States's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($60K/sec vs $0/sec for Cuba), adding roughly $5,201,280,000 to the difference each day.
Scale is part of the story too: United States's population (336M) is about 30.0× Cuba's (11M), which is part of why the nominal and per-capita comparisons above can point in different directions — a government's debt load scales loosely with the size of both its economy and its population, not either alone.
Cuba and United States are both grouped under this site's “Americas” region, so this is, in effect, an intra-regional comparison as well.
This analysis is generated automatically from live data as an educational orientation, not financial advice — see the methodology page for definitions and caveats.