Cuban digital identity: A summary of recent evidence
Guy Baron, Aberystwyth University, UK
Guy Baron - gub@aber.ac.uk
Paper for delivery at the CRF September 2014, Nottingham
1
Cuban digital identity: A summary of recent evidence
Abstracts
English
With the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, many people predicted the imminent
collapse of the Cuban regime and some critics saw the Internet as playing a major part in that
collapse. But this has simply not been the case and the socialist system remains today. It is a
widely held viewpoint that Internet use in Cuba is restricted due to a number of factors and
this paper intends to examine those factors and to attempt to discover to what extent the lack
of access to the World Wide Web has helped to maintain (with some evident changes) the
socialist status quo on the island. The paper follows an article soon to be published in BLAR
that also takes a brief look at how the Internet is used to represent the nation externally and
ultimately argues that there is a great deal of work to do by the Cuban government if it wishes
to take full advantage of what the Internet can offer.
Spanish
Con la caída de la Unión Soviética en la década de 1990, muchas personas predijeron el
inminente derrumbe del régimen cubano y algunos críticos predijeron que Internet
desempeñara un papel importante en ese derrumbe. Pero esto no ha pasado y el sistema
socialista sigue hoy en día. Es un punto de vista ampliamente sostenido que el uso de Internet
en Cuba está restringido debido a una serie de factores y este trabajo pretende examinar esos
factores y trata de descubrir en qué medida la falta de acceso a la red global (WWW) ha
ayudado a mantener (con algunos cambios evidentes) el sistema socialista en la isla. La
ponencia sigue un artículo que se publicará en Bulletin of Latin American Research (BLAR)
en lo cual también se lleva una breve mirada a cómo se utiliza Internet para representar a la
nación al exterior y, en última instancia sostiene que hay una gran cantidad de trabajo a
realizar por el gobierno cubano si quiere sacar el máximo provecho de lo que Internet puede
ofrecer.
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Cuban digital identity: A summary of recent evidence

‘Secrets are over [...] We are facing the most powerful weapon that has ever
existed, which is communication.’1
Introduction (from abstract)
It is a widely held viewpoint that Internet use in Cuba is restricted due to a number of factors
and this paper intends to examine those factors and to attempt to discover to what extent the
lack of access to the World Wide Web has helped to maintain (with some evident changes)
the socialist status quo on the island. The paper follows an article soon to be published in
BLAR that also takes a brief look at how the Internet is used to represent the nation
externally and ultimately argues that there is a great deal of work to do by the Cuban
government if it wishes to take full advantage of what the Internet can offer.
The state in Cuba effectively has control over print and broadcast media and, as the
Cuban Constitution says, the mass media forms part of ‘state or social property and cannot be
the object, under any circumstances, of private property,’ (my translation).2
The Cuban government’s Internet priorities have largely followed that of the UN
through UNESCO (United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization). In 1997
UNESCO’s Executive Council discussed the problems that face developing nations with
respect to information technologies and agreed to focus attention on ‘community programs
and the strengthening of development sectors like education, prior to wiring each individual
home’, and Cuba’s Internet development has largely followed this line of argument.
1
Fidel Castro, speaking to Mexican daily La Jornada in an August 2010 interview in which he hailed the
Internet. Quoted in Andrea Rodríguez, ‘In Cuba, mystery shrouds fate of Internet cable,’ in Associated Press
(May 21), 2012: <http://bigstory.ap.org/content/cuba-mystery-shrouds-fate-Internet-cable> (20/7/12).
2
Original Spanish: ‘propiedad estatal o social y no pueden ser objeto, en ningún caso, de propiedad privada’.
Constitución de la República de Cuba, Editora Política, La Habana, 1992, quoted in Elaine Díaz Rodríguez and
FiruzehSokooh Valle, ‘Internet y las TIC en Cuba: notas para un debate sobre políticas públicas,’ in Temas, 74
(April-June), 2013: 62-67 (66):
<http://www.temas.cult.cu/sumario.php?numero=74&Submit.x=3&Submit.y=> (22/8/13)
3
Cuba was the leader of new technology in Latin America before the Revolution with
the most televisions per head of population, but after 1959 communications were not seen as
part of national development, only as important for national defence and security. For
example, until 2000 the heads of the Ministry of Communications (MINCOM) were always
members of the military. In 1996 Cuba decided to connect to the Internet, creating the
Ministry of Information and Communications [Ministerio de la Informática y las
Comunicaciones] (MIC) in 2000.3 Cuba recognises the potential of the Internet but that
connection to it privileges institutions and businesses that have the greatest impact on Cuban
society.4 But the combination of an ageing telecommunications infrastructure, and the
economic crisis beginning in 1989 made any technological advancement extremely difficult
and so Cuba began to lag behind other Latin American and Caribbean nations in terms of
Internet connectivity.
But another barrier to Internet connectivity is that the Cuban government has always
been suspicious and perhaps even fearful of the advancement of new technologies and the
effects that they may have on the maintenance of the socialist system, especially when these
technologies emanate from the US. There has been a history of using communications to
bring down the Cuban regime: recently news has emerged of the creation by the USAID
organisation in Cuba of a Twitter-like social network, called ZunZuneo claimed by some to
be a mechanism designed to foster subversion on the island but described by White House
press secretary Jay Carney as a ‘development-assistance programme’:

‘I am not aware of individuals here in the White House who were involved’ (Jay
Carney, White House Press Secretary, The Guardian, 2014).
Bert Hoffmann, ‘El desarrollo cubano ante el reto de las nuevas tecnologías de información y comunicación
(NTIC)’, 2003: 297.
4
Hamlet López García, ‘Cultura digital participativa y software libre en Cuba,’ in Temas, no. 74 (April-June),
2013: 68-74 (70).
3
4
ZunZuneo began in 2010 and eventually had some 40,000 subscribers in Cuba who
received uncontroversial messages on such things as ‘soccer, music, and hurricane updates’
(The Guardian, 2014), although it is argued that such innocent beginnings could have led to
the creation of a ‘Cuban spring’ in a similar way to the Arab world, by attempting to upset
the balance of power between the state and civil society and create a push towards a
democratic transition. Of course Cuban subscribers would have had no idea that the service
was set up and run by a US organisation and its very legality is questionable. Eventually the
service, proving ineffective at creating any sense of a subversive movement and unreliable
for its users, faded away in 2012 and none of those Cubans who used it really knows where it
came from and where it went. So a certain amount of paranoia about new communications
technology is entirely understandable, resulting in the necessity to maintain some form of
control over and restriction of internet use:
So let’s look at how Internet use is restricted in Cuba.
Restrictions on Internet use in Cuba
Decree Law 209, passed in June 1996 to govern Cuba’s connection to the Internet, states that
access would be selective and would be granted “in a regulated manner […] giving priority to
the entities and institutions most relevant to the country’s life and development.”’5 So more
or less in line with UNESCO’s policy as mentioned.
We all know that Cubans have very limited access to the WWW partly due to its high
cost and slow connection speeds. But to what extent does the Cuban government foster this
lack of access and to what extent is access to certain information deliberately blocked? Critic
Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas, ‘The Internet and state control in authoritarian regimes: China, Cuba, and
the counterrevolution’, in First Monday, 6: 8 (August), 2001:
<http://www.firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/876/785> (16/8/12).
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5
Larry Press argues that the filtering of content and activity also limits Cuban’s access via
what is known as the AvilaLink ‘information management’ programme, apparently used in
places where multiple computers are in use.6 Cuban users, Press argues, are fully aware of the
possibility that their Internet use is being monitored and so this would automatically restrict
their experience. But the official argument for the lack of Internet access on a daily basis in
Cuba is that there are limited resources and technology to deliver it to everyone.
Reactive strategies then are important for the Cuban regime to counter the huge amount
of subversive material that comes from outside the island, over which the regime has no
control.

‘The largest share of Cuba–related political information on the Internet
emanates not from domestic sources, but from foreign–based organizations
trying to influence Cuban politics and U.S. policy toward Cuba.’7 Kalathil and
Boas, 2001.
The more subversive material that exists against the regime, the more the position of the
regime’s hardliners with respect to Internet control is strengthened.
Cuba has one of the world’s most stagnant rates of Internet connectivity (alongside
Uganda and Sri Lanka for example), even though there are other factors within the country
that should encourage Internet use, such as high literacy rates and a well-educated workforce.
Cuba is seen as an Internet enemy by Reporters Without Borders, the largest press
freedom organisation in the world but justifies the lack of Internet use at the level of the
individual.
Larry Press, ‘The state of the Internet in Cuba,’ 2011.
Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas, ‘The Internet and state control in authoritarian regimes: China, Cuba, and
the counter-revolution,’ 2001.
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6

Vice-Minister Boris Moreno: ‘The use of the Internet [must serve] to
defend the Revolution and the principles in which [Cuba] has believed for
years.’8
The defence that Vice –Minister Boris Moreno talks about here has included, according to
Reporters Without Borders, the repeated arrest and interrogation of bloggers like Yoani
Sánchez (the last time in October 2012), whose Generation Y blog is highly critical of the
Cuban government, calling it:

‘un gobierno que se encuentra entre los grandes depredadores de Internet
del mundo’ 21/8/14
Other bloggers, such as Luis Felipe Rojas, have been arrested several times and Cuban
dissident and cyberjournalist Guillermo Fariñas Hernández (“El Coco”), winner of the 2010
Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought awarded by the European Parliament, was arrested
three times in less than 48 hours in January 2011.9

Article 53 of the Cuban Constitution:
‘reconoce a los ciudadanos libertad de palabra y prensa conforme a los fines de la
sociedad socialista. ..las condiciones materiales para su ejercicio están dadas por el
hecho de que la prensa, la radio, la televisión, el cine y otros medios de difusión
masiva son de propiedad estatal o social y no pueden ser objeto, en ningún caso,
de propiedad privada, lo que asegura su uso al servicio exclusivo del pueblo
trabajador y del interés de la sociedad’
Reporters Without Borders, ‘Internet enemies: Cuba,’2011:
<http://en.rsf.org/Internet-enemie-cuba,39756.html> (14/8/12)
9
Reporters Without Borders, ‘Internet enemies: Cuba,’ 2011.
8
7
rights to freedom of speech and the press are recognised in accordance with the
aims of socialist society. Material conditions for the exercise of these rights are
given by the fact that the press, radio, television, cinema and other means of mass
information belong to the state or society and could not, in any case, become
private property, which assures their exclusive use for working people and for the
benefit of society.10
So the Internet immediately poses a dilemma for the Cuban government in the potential for a
lack of control over such a mass medium, but at the same time its power as an economic,
social and political force must be recognised and harnessed. To this end a more proactive use
of the Internet developed from 2000 with the ‘Programa Rector para la Informatización de la
Sociedad Cubana’ and some of its priorities are listed here:

‘Programa Rector para la Informatización de la Sociedad Cubana’

Potenciar el uso masivo de las Nuevas Tecnologías de la Información y las
comunicaciones a favor del desarrollo de la economía nacional, la sociedad
y el servicio al ciudadano…

Apoyar el desarrollo e implementación de sistemas verticales de
informatización, la informática aplicada a la gestión económica y de
recursos humanos…

Promover el uso extendido del Correo Electrónico y el desarrollo de
intranets corporativas…

Estimular el Comercio Electrónico como una de las nuevas formas de
trabajo y de comercialización…
Bert Hoffmann, ‘El desarrollo cubano ante el reto de las nuevas tecnologías de información y comunicación
(NTIC),’2003: 298.
10
8
So, based on these fundamental goals the state promotes Internet development in areas it
considers priorities. But nowhere does it mention the right of individual citizens to have
unrestricted access to the WWW. But what effect would this have? Is the Cuban government
scared of a Cuban Spring?
There is certainly a complex relationship between political liberties and Internet
adoption in which not all authoritarian regimes discourage Internet use similarly. Anyway
simply equating technological freedom and access to information with some kind of
democratic change is teleologically naïve as Enrique González-Manet suggests.
Enrique González-Manet, a professor of Communication at the University of Havana, is
one of the country's leading exponents of the uses and possible repercussions of technology
in developing nations. He sees the emergence of the Internet as a type of revolution that
cannot be stopped but warns that views of it as a great equalizer and force for democracy are
misleading since we must take into consideration that:

in the Third World, ‘75% of the population barely has access to 10% of
communications media, 6% of the telephones, 5% of the computers, and
2% of the satellites.’11
Kalathil and Boas agree and argue that although most media commentators believe that
the Internet is inevitably a force for democracy, ‘no significant body of scholarly work has
sought to address the widespread popular belief that the Internet will undermine authoritarian
rule.’
11
Enrique Gonzalez-Manet, quoted in Cristina Venegas, ‘Will the Internet Spoil Fidel Castro's Cuba?’ 1999.
9
So, it appears there are three main reasons for the lack of free and open access to the
Internet in Cuba: ‘the US embargo, the Cuban economy, and the government's fear of
information freedom’.12 The embargo has made it difficult for Cuba to obtain the raw
materials necessary to set up an Internet infrastructure (routers, modems etc are extremely
expensive and not freely available). Due to the economic situation in the 1990s it is
understandable that those first tentative steps to Internet connectivity were delivered a
significant economic blow even before the project could really get off the ground. At that
time Cuba was not as open to foreign investment as it is today and so the development of
such an expensive project was all but halted.
So although we can say that access to the Internet is difficult for most Cuban citizens,
they do connect, so how?
How do Cubans connect to the Internet?
Estimating precisely the extent of Internet use is impossible. A study of 38,000 people by the
Cuban National Statistics Office (ONE) in 2009 illustrates that only around 2.9% of
respondents had had direct access to the Internet in the previous year. 13 However, according
to Andrea Rodríguez of Associated Press, ‘outside experts estimate the real figure is likely to
be 5 to 10 percent accounting for black market sales of dial-up minutes.’14 Compare this to
Albania (54%), Ethiopa (1.4%), Guatemala (16%), Haiti (10%), Pakistan (10%), Thailand
(26%).15
Larry Press, ‘The state of the Internet in Cuba,’ 2011.
Dirección de Turismo, Comercio y Servicios de Cuba.‘Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones.
Uso y Acceso en Cuba’ (September), 2010:
<http://www.one.cu/publicaciones/06turismoycomercio/TIC/2009%20TIC%20Uso%20y%20Acceso%20en%20
Cuba.pdf> (13/7/12).
14
Andrea Rodríguez, ‘In Cuba, mystery shrouds fate of Internet cable,’ 2012.
15
2012 figures. "Percentage of Individuals using the Internet 2000-2012", International Telecommunications
Union (Geneva), June 2013 (22/1/14).
12
13
10
Resolution 73 from the Ministry of Culture on 16 September, 2009 established the Law
on the National Registry of Websites (Reglamento del Registro Nacional de Sitios Web RNSW). Under this law websites are obliged to declare a thematic profile, objectives,
potential users, and dates of use, thus prohibiting the publication of content and services
without the authorisation of a state institution that becomes ultimately responsible for the site.
This therefore severely limits the creation and development of virtual communities as they
need to search for state entities to support them.16
We know that private, individual access to the Internet is not easy in Cuba. It has
however recently (July 2013) set up a network of 118 internet cafes across the island with the
tradename ‘Nauta’ where individuals can access the internet but at a relatively high cost
($4.5/hour) much cheaper if you want only national access.
The future of the Internet in Cuba
Since the announcement in 2007 of the laying of a fibre-optic cable between Venezuela and
Siboney in Cuba’s Eastern province, talk of fast and individual Internet connections has been
rife in Cuba. The project is called ALBA-1 and should have been completed in July 2011 at a
cost of $70 million, which includes a link from Cuba to Jamaica. However, news of this cable
recently has been extremely hard to come by with nothing more than rumours coming out of
Cuba. There has been no official connection to the cable and certain analysts are asking why.
Although the cable has been laid, it is not even mentioned in official reports, and nobody
seems to have an official stance on what is happening to it. However people talk quietly
16
Ibid.
11
about embezzlement torpedoing the project and the arrest of more than a half-dozen senior
telecom officials.17
Obviously there is no logic to investing $70m in an undersea cable for it not to be used
but there has been speculation as to why the island has apparently not yet been properly
connected to it. It may just be that the internal infrastructure needs to be updated in order to
carry the new service that the cable will eventually provide. This is backed up by comments
from the Deputy Minister of Informatics and Telecommunications, Jorge Luis Perdomo
reported in xinhuanet.com who says: ‘the arrival of the fibre-optic cable is not a “magic
wand”. The country still needs to develop domestic infrastructure of telephony and data,
which cannot be done overnight.’18 But the intentions of the Cuban government towards
Internet access for its citizens are presented enigmatically at best. As Perdomo says:

‘There is total commitment of the Cuban government to further develop
the telecommunications sector in terms of economic and social development
of the country.’19
Boris Moreno Cordovés, Vice-Minister of MIC, spoke recently at the National Assembly
saying: ‘we will continue to intensify access [to the Internet] where it is necessary for the
development of the country.’20 He commented that there did exist the will to improve Internet
services if and when economic resources allowed the necessary development of the
infrastructure to allow this to happen. A recent visit by Eric Schmidt of Google to Cuba and
Andrea Rodríguez, ‘In Cuba, mystery shrouds fate of Internet cable,’ 2012.
Shasha Deng, ‘Cuba to get High-Speed Internet via Venezuela,’Xinhua News Agency (February 7), 2011:
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2011-02/08/c_13722293.htm> (20/7/12).
19
Shasha Deng, ‘Cuba to get High-Speed Internet via Venezuela,’ 2011.
20
Quoted in Yohandry Fontana Sábado, ‘Cuba continuará priorizando el acceso social a Internet’ (30 July),
2011:
<http://www.yohandry.com/index.php/component/content/article/57-yohandry/578-cuba-continuarapriorizando-el-acceso-social-a-Internet->(14/8/12).
17
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the legalisation of Google Chrome hints at future possibilities but Moreno Cordovés also
made it clear that the US government had made Cuba’s access to important content and tools
on the Internet very difficult, these measures forming part of the continued blockade of the
island that makes it impossible for them to participate in electronic commerce for example.
But what that means for day to day access for Cuban citizens is not clear and the Cuban
people should not be expecting an Internet revolution any time soon. Perhaps the Arab Spring
has made the Cuban government think again about allowing free and easy access to the
World Wide Web and it is well known that Raúl Castro has warned of a supposed plot by
enemies of the Cuban state in the United States to wage a cyber-war against the island. ‘In
2011, a Cuban court sentenced US subcontractor Alan Gross to 15 years after convicting him
of crimes against the state for importing restricted communications equipment that he insists
was only meant to help the island's Jewish community gain better Internet access.’21
Conclusion
In terms of the Cuban economy the Internet will be vital for Cuba’s development in a global
arena. The Cuban state must play a similar role then in order to improve the Cuban economy,
and the Internet needs to play a significant part in that development.
When people speak of an ‘agricultural age’ or the ‘industrial age’, what they really
speak of is economic development that comes out of those ‘ages’ (land and industry in these
two cases).22 The ‘information age’ is no different; technology, information and
communications are at the heart of economic development today and for Cuba to develop it
must embrace this area. It is obvious then that the priority for the Cuban government is
Internet development at the level of the governmental and structural and not at the level of the
21
22
Andrea Rodríguez, ‘In Cuba, mystery shrouds fate of Internet cable,’ 2012.
Emir Suaiden, ‘Sociedad de la información: un simposio,’ in Temas, no. 74 (April-June), 2013: 4-12 (4).
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individual. But a new ‘literacy campaign’ at the level of civil society with respect to the
Internet is also necessary in Cuba and the creative use of technology such as the Internet by
non-state bodies is essential to that. But this implies a profound change in the way that the
Cuban government sees the development of the Internet and perhaps it has no bigger internal
challenge.

‘Today, with the development of information technologies, of social
networks, of computing and the Internet, prohibiting something is almost a
chimera, impossible ... makes no sense ... We must constantly be in
dialogue.’
Miguel Díaz-Canel, First Vice President of the Council of State, 2013.
To finish I’d like to play a 4 minute edited version of a documentary by Yaima Pardo that
was released on Youtube a few weeks ago. She sent me the following message, by email:
Deseamos ser actores dentro del proceso de neo-alfabetización que estamos planteando
como una necesidad. Perseguimos llamar la atención para lograr una apertura lógica y
necesaria al acceso a las nuevas tecnologías sin tener que escudarnos más en
justificaciones que ya debieron estar resueltas. Nuestro principal objetivo es lograr que
los sectores de la sociedad sobre los que podamos actuar entiendan que es una necesidad
tener acceso a Internet para la evolución del país en todo sentido, que esto forma parte
de la democracia que promulgamos y que debemos exigirlo como un derecho humano a
la información.
Off-line
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