Cuba's digital landscape has grown darker, both figuratively and literally. Freedom House's newly released Freedom on the Net 2026 report gives the island 19 points out of 100, a two-point drop from last year, confirming its place among the world's most restrictive environments for internet access and expression. The finding lands the country just above Russia, China, Iran, and Myanmar in a ranking of 38 nations, and erases the modest gains recorded in 2025.
A Score Built on Scarcity and Fear
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 barriers to access, 9 of 35 for limits on content, and just 5 of 40 for violations of user rights. That last figure, arguably the most telling, reflects a climate where going online carries real legal risk. Freedom House attributes the overall decline to three intertwined forces: an energy crisis that has crippled connectivity, a sharp rise in the cost of mobile data, and intensified punishment of people who criticize the government on social media.
The energy dimension is stark. Chronic national blackouts have left roughly 47.5 percent of mobile radio bases and 56.5 percent of telecommunications cabinets without power for extended stretches, since backup batteries can sustain service for only a few hours. One blackout in March 2026 triggered a 65 percent collapse in internet traffic, with full recovery taking around 29 hours. For a population already dependent on a single state-run provider, these outages are not incidental disruptions but structural features of daily life online.
The Price of Staying Connected
Access has also become dramatically more expensive. In May 2025, ETECSA, Cuba's sole mobile provider, capped peso-denominated top-ups at 360 CUP per month and pushed users toward data packages priced in foreign currency, an effective 13-fold increase in the cost of mobile internet. For a population already strained economically, this amounts to a quiet form of rationing: connectivity becomes a privilege tied to access to hard currency rather than a basic utility.
Repression Moves from the Street to the Feed
Perhaps the most alarming shift concerns user rights. Freedom House lowered Cuba's score for online mobilization from three to two points after documenting prison sentences, including one of 14 years, handed to individuals who called for protests on social media. Among the cases cited are activist Alexander Verdecia, sentenced to seven years for his posts, a journalist sentenced to six years according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Yasser García López, sentenced in May 2026 to five years for comments made on Facebook.
The report also flags that ETECSA "apparently facilitated" the hacking of accounts belonging to activists, opposition figures, and independent journalists, a finding serious enough to zero out the corresponding indicator entirely. Freedom House is careful to frame this as its own analytical judgment rather than a judicial determination, but the underlying mechanism is plausible given the structure of Cuba's network: a state-controlled carrier that also handles SMS verification codes is well positioned to intercept the very authentication messages meant to protect user accounts. A separate study by Prisoners Defenders, based on 200 testimonies and published in January 2026, found that 98.5 percent of participants reported reprisals tied to digital activity, with nearly half describing unauthorized access to their own accounts.
Part of a Wider Global Retreat
Censorship extends beyond individual accounts to entire outlets. At least 23 independent Cuban media sites, including 14ymedio, CubaNet, Diario de Cuba, and El Toque, remained blocked within the island throughout 2026. Freedom House situates Cuba's trajectory within a broader, more troubling pattern: global internet freedom has now declined for sixteen consecutive years, worsening in 16 of the 38 countries studied 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 Freedom House's deputy director of research, adding that democracies must now "invest in making censorship fail." For Cubans navigating blackouts, inflated data costs, and the threat of prison for a single post, that investment cannot come soon enough.