Cuba's digital landscape grew more restrictive over the past year, according to Freedom House's annual Freedom on the Net report, released Thursday. The island scored 19 out of 100 points, two fewer than in 2025, cementing its place among the world's most tightly controlled internet environments and reversing a modest gain recorded the previous cycle.
A score built on blackouts and blocked speech
The report, titled "Seismic Shifts on the Global Internet" and covering June 2025 through May 2026, breaks Cuba's total into three categories: 5 of 25 points for obstacles to access, 9 of 35 for limits on content, and just 5 of 40 for protections of user rights. That final figure, the lowest of the three, reflects a climate in which expressing dissent online carries real legal risk. Among the 38 countries assessed worldwide, Cuba now sits just above Russia, which scored 16, and China, Iran, and Myanmar, each tied at 9.
Freedom House points to three intersecting forces behind the decline: a worsening energy crisis, a sharp rise in the cost of connectivity, and intensified prosecution of people who speak out on social media. None of these operates in isolation - together they describe a state apparatus using infrastructure, pricing, and the courts as complementary tools of control.
When the grid fails, so does the network
Cuba's prolonged blackouts did more than darken homes; they severed connectivity on a national scale. Backup batteries at telecommunications sites typically hold only a few hours of charge, and documented data cited in the report shows that outages left roughly 47.5% of mobile radio bases and 56.5% of telecommunications cabinets inoperative. One blackout in March 2026 triggered a 65% drop in internet traffic, with full recovery taking around 29 hours - a striking illustration of how fragile energy infrastructure can double as a de facto censorship mechanism, intentional or not.
Affordability compounded the damage. In May 2025, state monopoly ETECSA capped peso-based top-ups at 360 CUP a month and pushed customers toward packages priced in foreign currency, raising the effective cost of mobile internet by roughly thirteen times. For a population already contending with scarcity, that shift alone functions as a powerful barrier to access, independent of any deliberate content restriction.
Prison sentences for posts, not protests
The report's sharpest decline appears in the indicator measuring citizens' ability to organize and campaign online, which dropped from three points to two. Freedom House links the change directly to judicial outcomes: several individuals received multi-year prison sentences - one as long as 14 years - for calling for demonstrations on social media during the period under review. Cited cases include activist Alexander Verdecia, sentenced to seven years over social media posts, and a journalist sentenced to six years for protesting, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In May 2026, Yasser García López received a five-year sentence tied to Facebook posts.
The report also states that ETECSA "apparently facilitated" the hacking of accounts and communications belonging to activists, opposition figures, and independent journalists - an assessment, Freedom House is careful to note, rather than a judicial finding. The mechanism described involves state control over network infrastructure and verification messages, which could allow authentication codes to be intercepted. A separate January 2026 study by Prisoners Defenders, based on 200 testimonies, found that 98.5% of participants reported reprisals connected to digital activity, with nearly half describing unauthorized access to their own accounts. At least 23 independent Cuban news sites, including 14ymedio, CubaNet, Diario de Cuba, and El Toque, remained blocked from within the island throughout 2026.
Part of a wider sixteen-year slide
Cuba's trajectory mirrors a global pattern. Freedom House reports that internet freedom has declined for sixteen consecutive years worldwide, worsening in 16 of the 38 countries surveyed and improving in only eight. "Authoritarian regimes are redesigning the internet as a control system, deciding who can connect, what they can see, and whether they can be heard," said Kian Vesteinsson, the report's author and deputy director of research at Freedom House. "After 16 years of decline, democracies must lead the fight for a free and open internet. Dictators invest in keeping people disconnected. We must invest in making censorship fail."