Some people in Spain look caucasian, some others have darker skin and look more Latin. So I wonder how Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas would be classified?
Caucasian. The Spanish have the oldest DNA in Europe. Latino or Latin in Europe means a person from a country that speaks a romance language; ie a language derived from Latin which was the language of the Romans. Hispanic and latino are not races or ethnicities. In the USA the terms are poorly used and poorly defined as they are very vague. Some American sources define hispanic as a person from a former Spanish New World colony or their descendants in the USA. That makes Salma Hayek, Alberto Fujimori, Linda Carter, Cameron D??az and Sammy Davis Jr. hispanics. Some people extend hispanic to the Spanish themselves or their descendants so that would make Cruz and banderas as well as Charlie Sheen hispanic.
We white people have a lot of different looks based on ancestry. Our skin is not actually white and the tone of our skin, the color of our eyes and the color and texture of our hair can vary. I have been in Spain a lot and travel there frequently. The only non-whites I have ever seen were recent immigrants from non-white countries or foreign tourists.
Clantarf 1002′s answer is correct! "Caucasian" is a way to describe race. The exact boundaries of the Caucasian race are a matter of debate; but Europeans, Arabs, Iranians, other Middle East and Caucasian populations, many Afghans and Indians are classified as Caucasian.
"Latino" is a very ambiguous term with no precise meaning. The most accurate would be (as Clontarf notes) someone who speaks a Romance language – French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalonian, etc. More loosely, it is an ethnic grouping – meaning, someone who belongs to one of those ethnicities.
In the USA, people tend to use race and ethnic terms in a slightly confused way (well, confused compared to most other places). "Hispanic" is often considered a "race" in the US. That’s really an administrative or legal definition of "race", not the same as the scientific definition of race. For anthropologists,, there’s no such thing as a "Hispanic" or "Latino" race, although they could arguably be called ethnic groups.
Antonio Dom??nguez Banderas was born in Andalusia in Spain, or pure Spanish heritage. The Andalusian coast was part of the "civilised" world of Classical Greek and Roman antiquity since around 600 BC.