Even before attaining its independence from Spain, Cuba had several constitutions either proposed or adopted by insurgents as governing documents for territory they controlled during their war against Spain. Cuba has had several constitutions since winning its independence. The first constitution since the Cuban Revolution was drafted in 1976 and has since been amended. In 2018, Cuba became engaged in a major revision of its constitution. The current communist state constitution was then enacted in 2019.

Events in early 19th-century Spain prompted a general concern with constitutions throughout Spain's overseas possessions. In 1808, both Ferdinand VII of Spain and his predecessor and father, Charles IV of Spain, resigned their claims to the throne in favor of Napoleon Bonaparte, who in turn passed the crown to his brother Joseph Bonaparte. In the ensuing Peninsular War, the Spanish waged a war of independence against the French Empire. On 19 March 1812, the Cortes Generales in refuge in Cádiz adopted the Spanish Constitution of 1812, which established a constitutional monarchy and eliminated many basic institutions that privileged some groups over others. The Cortes included representatives from throughout the Spanish Empire, including Cuba.

Several models of constitutional government were proposed for Cuba. José Agustín Caballero [es] offered "a charter for Cuban autonomy under Spanish rule" in Diario de la Habana in 1810, elaborated as the Project for an Autonomous Government in Cuba in 1811. The next year, Bayamo attorney Joaquín Infante living in Caracas wrote his Constitutional Project for the Island of Cuba. He reconciled his liberal political principles with slavery in Cuba, noting that slavery existed in the United States alongside republican government. Spanish authorities imprisoned him for his writings. In 1821, Félix Varela represented Cuba in the Cortes Generales of Spain during a short period when the Constitution of 1812 was revived. He joined in a petition to the Crown for the independence of Spain's Latin American colonies, supported by his Project of Instruction for the Politically and Economically Autonomous Government of the Overseas Provinces.

The Guáimaro Constitution was the governing document written by the idealistic and politically liberal faction in the insurgency that contested Spanish colonial rule in Cuba and imposed on Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the conservative who claimed leadership of the independence movement. It was nominally in effect from 1869 to 1878 during the Ten Years' War against Spain, governing the Republic of Cuba in Arms.

After the Spanish took re-possession of the island in 1878, the Baraguá Constitution was written in a brief attempt at re-igniting the war, re-establishing the Republic of Cuba in Arms with Manuel de Jesús Calvar as President.

Two ad hoc constitutions were adopted in the course of Cuba's last fight for independence from Spain (1895–1898). On 16 September 1895, delegates representing the rebel forces adopted a constitution in Jimaguayú, the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba in Arms, and set it to be reviewed in two years by a representative assembly. It described relations between civil and military authority. It named key officials and outlined the requirements of a peace treaty with Spain. In September 1897, the assembly met in La Yaya [es], adopted a new document on 30 October, and named a new president and vice-president.

La Yaya Constitution written in 1897 was the last constitution before the defeat of the Spanish. The principal notable passages of this constitution on equal civil rights, the right of suffrage and the rights governing equal education for all Cubans were written by General José Braulio Alemán Urquía. This constitution was used as template for the 1901 Constitution.

The 1901 Constitution, was Cuba's first as an independent state. It incorporated eight principles set out in the Platt Amendment without which United States troops would not have been withdrawn from Cuba, including the clause that the U.S. has the right to intervene in Cuba's affairs to protect its independence and guarantee the stability of its government. All but one of the Platt Amendment principles remained in force until a treaty between Cuba and the U.S., the Cuban–American Treaty of Relations (1934), negotiated as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy toward Latin America, took effect on 9 June 1934, leaving the U.S. only its right to a permanent lease to its Guantanamo Naval Station.