The Hubbard model is used to study an electronic system at half filling. Starting from a functional integral representation the spin-up Grassmann field is integrated out. It is shown that the resulting spinless fermion theory has an instantaneous cluster interaction, and that the spinless fermions are coupled to thermally fluctuating Ising spins. The coupling parameter of the spinless fermion interaction is a product of the Hubbard interaction and the hopping rate. As an example the strongly metallic as well as the strongly insulating regime are investigated in terms of the effective Ising statistics.