Cuba's digital landscape deteriorated further over the past year, according to Freedom House's newly released Freedom on the Net 2026 report. The island scored 19 out of 100 points, down from 21 the previous year, keeping its designation as "Not Free" and pushing it toward the bottom of the 38 countries evaluated worldwide, ahead of only Russia, China, Iran, and Myanmar.
A Score Built on Collapse
The report, titled "Seismic Shifts on the Global Internet" and published on October 22, 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 final figure, the lowest of the three, reflects a pattern of surveillance, intimidation, and prosecution that Freedom House says has intensified rather than eased.
Much of the decline traces back to Cuba's chronic energy crisis. Prolonged blackouts during the June 2025 to May 2026 reporting period left an estimated 47.5% of mobile radio bases and 56.5% of telecommunications cabinets inoperative, since backup batteries sustain network function for only a few hours during extended outages. One blackout in March 2026 triggered a 65% drop in internet traffic nationwide, with full recovery taking around 29 hours - a vivid illustration of how fragile infrastructure can function as a de facto censorship tool, whether or not that is its intent.
The Rising Price of Staying Connected
Economic pressure compounded the infrastructure problems. In May 2025, state telecommunications monopoly ETECSA capped peso-denominated mobile top-ups at 360 CUP per month and pushed users toward data packages priced in foreign currency, a shift that Freedom House estimates raised the effective cost of mobile internet access by roughly thirteen times. For a population already contending with inflation and scarcity, that kind of price shock functions as a access barrier nearly as effective as technical restrictions, quietly pricing ordinary citizens out of consistent online participation.
Prosecutions and Surveillance Targeting Dissent
Freedom House's sharpest findings concern the treatment of people who speak out online. The indicator measuring citizens' ability to mobilize and campaign through digital platforms fell from three points to two, a change the organization attributes directly to criminal sentencing: several individuals received multi-year prison terms, including one sentence of 14 years, for calling for protests on social media. Documented cases include activist Alexander Verdecia, sentenced to seven years over social media posts; a journalist sentenced to six years for protesting, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists; and Yasser García López, sentenced to five years in May 2026 for Facebook posts.
The report also states that ETECSA "apparently facilitated" the hacking of accounts and communications belonging to activists, opposition figures, and independent journalists - a judgment that zeroed out the corresponding indicator entirely. Freedom House is careful to frame this as its own analytical conclusion rather than a judicial finding, noting that state control over network infrastructure and verification messages could plausibly allow authorities to intercept authentication codes used to secure accounts. A separate study by Prisoners Defenders, based on 200 testimonies and published in January 2026, found that 98.5% of participants reported reprisals linked to their digital activity, with nearly half describing unauthorized access to their own accounts.
Blocked Media and a Global Pattern
At least 23 independent Cuban news outlets remained blocked from within the island through 2026, including 14ymedio, CubaNet, Diario de Cuba, and El Toque. For many Cubans, reaching this kind of reporting requires circumvention tools or workarounds that carry their own risks under a legal system willing to imprison people for online expression.
Cuba's trajectory mirrors a broader deterioration Freedom House documents worldwide: internet freedom has now declined for sixteen consecutive years, 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."