Let $\mathbb{S}_g$ be the orientable surface of genus $g$. We show that the number of vertex-labelled cubic multigraphs embeddable on $\mathbb{S}_g$ with $2n$ vertices is asymptotically $c_g n^{5(g-1)/2-1}\gamma^{2n}(2n)!$, where $\gamma$ is an algebraic constant and $c_g$ is a constant depending only on the genus $g$. We also derive an analogous result for simple cubic graphs and weighted cubic multigraphs. Additionally we prove that a typical cubic multigraph embeddable on $\mathbb{S}_g$, $g\ge 1$, has exactly one non-planar component.