Communications blackouts are scary in violent conflict situations, especially in places where mobile messaging services like WhatsApp dominate person-to-person communication. They leave people unable to seek shelter or medical attention or to find out if their loved ones are safe. At least this outage was mercifully brief. And it’s nothing new for people in Sudan. During the protests that brought down Al-Bashir, and the 2021 military coup, nationwide internet blackouts went on for days, and sometimes weeks, at a time.

Meanwhile in the U.S., Discord, the online discussion platform popular among gamers, was thrust into the national security spotlight last week when news broke that a young military officer named Jack Teixeira had published more than 100 classified documents, most of them related to U.S. strategy around the war in Ukraine, on a Discord server. Although it sounds like Discord has been quick to cooperate with authorities and to explain at least some of its response to the public, I’m still wondering whether it will become a new target of attempts to regulate tech platforms. Time will tell.

And the clock is also ticking in Turkey, where disinformation is peaking in the lead up to national elections on May 14. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Turkish government’s communications director, Fahrettin Altun, voiced concern about disinformation in the wake of the February earthquakes and as polling day approaches. He might mean something different than we do. This week, Middle East Eye reported that at least 12,000 Twitter accounts were reactivated in Turkey, with most using either Russian or Hungarian as their primary language — sure signs of troll farms preparing to manipulate people’s understanding of what is and isn’t happening around them. We’ll be keeping close watch on the disinfo machine there as elections approach.

CUBAN AUTHORITIES OFFER ‘PERSONALIZED’ CENSORSHIP

Another election took place recently that didn’t make big headlines: Cubans voted for representatives to the country’s national assembly, which cemented a second term in office for Miguel Díaz Canel, the successor of the Castro dynasty. While every person in office there is either a member of, or sympathetic to, the Cuban Communist Party, this is far from true of all Cubans, many of whom did not vote at all.

It was the first national election since the 2020-2021 social movement that saw public demonstrations erupt across the country at a level never before seen in Cuba’s history. Digital activism and independent online media work played a big role in the movement and continue to fuel it, albeit more quietly than two years ago.

State repression of people doing this work has been a constant source of struggle. But thanks to these networks, many more people now have seen and heard firsthand accounts of the thuggish realities of living under Cuban state security. Hundreds of Cubans have been arrested for demonstrating, criticizing state policies and practice and reporting on human rights violations. Estimates and definitions vary, but at the end of 2022, there were at least 1,000 people jailed or serving time on politically-driven charges. 

Those who are not behind bars continue to use a combination of tactics on the street and on their screens to show what’s happening day to day. Cubalex, a local independent group that monitors rule of law violations, kept an open record of “incidents of repression” leading up to elections. Much of what’s documented here feels like garden-variety authoritarianism — street surveillance, police stops, brief detentions. But one tactic has an extra special flavor, something unique to a small state — Cuba’s sole telecommunications provider, ETECSA, has been cutting off individual mobile phone service when journalists or activists get too vocal online.

I took a look at the issue last week, with the help of Yucabyte, a Cuban media and activism site, and its founder, Norges Rodriguez. The tactic, he explained, is nothing new. They’ve been cutting off people’s communication lines, and fixed line internet, since 2003. But the protests triggered a new wave of cuts, as did the recent election. Some activists have tried approaching ETECSA to find out what’s going on.

“The response is always that you need to change your SIM card, or that there are technical problems. Or they just don’t have a response,” Rodriguez told me. “They never say that the service outage is motivated by what a person posted on social networks. ETECSA will not get into that.”

In an interview in Yucabyte, veteran independent journalist Luz Escobar talked about her experiences having her phone line cut.

“If ETECSA cuts off your service, you have no way to connect,” she said. A seasoned reporter with 14yMedio, one of the country’s best-known independent media outlets, Escobar was detained for her reporting in 2020 and had her mobile line cut off repeatedly before she left the country last year.

“They know the phone is a powerful tool. That’s why they’re so afraid of it, and why they always make you lose time and money, because they know how difficult it is to get a mobile phone in Cuba, and they know how difficult it is to do the most basic things, like download an app,” Escobar said.

Indeed, if you’ve been wondering what’s so hard about getting a new SIM card or a new phone altogether, consider the country’s economic crisis. It has always been hard and expensive to get and maintain hardware — now it’s even more so.

For human rights activist Abu Dayanah, these tactics will ultimately only put more pressure on the authorities: “When there’s more persecution, there’s more resistance,” he says. Dayanah’s mobile line has been cut off continuously since April of 2021. But it has not kept him quiet.

I’ll close by sending kudos to the digital forensic sleuths at Citizen Lab for their recent release on the surveillance tech firm QuaDream. Since the research group published evidence of the spyware company’s “zero-click” attack capabilities the company has terminated its operations altogether. That is impact.

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It was the latest digital shutdown to occur during the wave of unrest. On July 11 — fueled by electricity cuts, food and medicine shortages, and a spiraling economic crisis — thousands of Cubans took to the streets in the country’s largest protest movement in decades. Images and videos of the protests ricocheted across social media. Shortly thereafter, digital rights groups began reporting a series of internet outages, while authorities blocked access to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter for days on end.

The Cuban government, led by Raúl Castro’s successor, President Miguel Díaz Canal, quickly moved to clamp down on the unrest. Since protests broke out, the government has detained an estimated 700 people, according to human rights organizations, and relatives of those held report being left in the dark for extended periods of time about their family members’ whereabouts. “At any moment, they could show up at my door,” a Cuban independent journalist told the New York Times. “It’s a fear that’s with me from the moment I wake up.”

The country’s last major protest movement was in 1994. That was a previous internet era, a time before smartphones and social media. In 2018, after years of internet restrictions, Cuba began permitting 3G for mobile phones, and later legalized wireless networks in homes and businesses. Many believe the country’s expanded internet access has played a key role in the current protest moment.

From Russia to Africa, internet blackouts have become a go-to method of repression for authoritarian governments during elections and political unrest. 

Norges Rodríguez is the co-founder of YucaByte, a website about technology, activism, and culture in Cuba. He believes the internet has helped bring about a Cuban version of perestroika, the series of political and economic reforms launched by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union during the 1980s, by allowing people to access a wider range of information than previously possible — including perspectives that challenge the government’s tight grip on power. 

We talked about how Cuba’s digital ecosystem has become a political battlefield as protests test the regime’s hold on the country. 

This conversation was edited for length and clarity and translated from Spanish.

Coda Story: The news out of Cuba is moving quickly. So let’s start with what’s happening. Can you bring us up to speed on what’s going on right now in Cuba and the state of internet access?

Norges Rodríguez: Right now there are no protests. What there is is a lot of repression. After the protests, which lasted 3 days more or less, there was a campaign of repression. There are people who are missing, their families don’t know anything about them, people who are detained and some who have been let out, mainly because of international pressure. But there are no protests.

The [authorities’] response to these incidents is not disinformation, but brute force. And brute force is turning off the internet and social networks.

The thing is this is an analog government confronting a digital reality. For TV and radio they had and have a monopoly. They said something and this was the truth. But this reality changed because for many people, social media is something else. What you say on the radio and TV, after, people do fact-checking of what you said. This has harmed them.

I want to talk a little bit more about the significance of the internet and social media in this moment. Do you think that this could have happened without social media?

No. In December 2018, Cuba connected to the internet for the first time from mobile phones. Before this, they didn’t have internet 24 hours a day. This began to generate what we called the ‘infoactivism’ of Cubans. From then on, people started to organize themselves, using groups on Telegram. Not just to protest, but to help each other. 

In January 2019, there was a tornado in Havana and people organized themselves to help people who had been harmed. In May 2019, the LGBT community marched in Havana and protested. They organized on WhatsApp, Telegram. It wasn’t that big. But it ended with repression and a lot of people were detained. After this it could be a kind of timeline of everything that has happened in Cuba, that is related to the access to the internet and social media. 

I think that the internet has been the perestroika of Cuba. You can go to the internet to get information but also you can transmit, upload videos and tell a story. You can access information you didn’t know, and then you can convert it into media. It can be a video transmitted on facebook that can get a million views. 

In some ways, what you're describing kind of seems like an older moment in the history of the internet. For example, during the Arab Spring, I remember hearing people talk excitedly about how it represented the promise of the internet and the digital sphere. But now, in the U.S., at least, it often feels like we are in a digital moment that feels much harsher. 

I totally understand what you mean. In the context of countries that have democracy, human rights, it has been negative, but because social media it’s like a country inside the country, or a state inside the state. There is no precedent, because laws don’t go at the same speed as technology. But in the context of Cuba specifically, I think it has been positive. I worry about countries where there was this spring but in the end there wasn’t a more democratic change. Power adapted and started to use social media as a mechanism of control.

Do you think that could happen in Cuba?

It worries me. I think this scenario could happen. But on the other side, I note that within the government, I feel that they don’t have the skills to carry this out. I think there’s a generational element. There are very few young people committed to the regime. Those leading the country are almost all over 80, 90 years old. On a social level, there’s a disconnection between the people who are tech savvy, who are almost all young people, and those who dominate the country, the physical space. And I think this could be negative for them, for their objective to stay in power.

Do you have any predictions or thoughts about what may happen next. Do you think people can expect to see more blackouts? 

Well, if there are protests, there’s obviously going to be more blackouts. And I think you are going to see protests. Because the things that brought people to protest were things like food -- there’s not a lot of food in the country -- electricity blackouts -- continue. The pandemic hasn’t been resolved. 

People asked for liberty and an end to the dictatorship. And there’s no liberty, the dictatorship continues. So there are all of the elements there for people to protest. And if people go out to protest, obviously [the government is] going to turn off the internet.

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Videos posted to social media by protesters on Sunday have shown hundreds of people marching through Havana and elsewhere in anti-government demonstrations sparked by a worsening economic crisis. Food and medicine shortages, rising prices and Covid restrictions have seen ordinary Cubans unable to work in the island nation’s tourism industry and led to lengthy queues for basic food items. 

One video uploaded to Twitter showed protesters overturning a police car in Cardenas, 90 miles from Havana. 

Recently, shutting down the internet has become the repressive tool of choice for authoritarian governments. In countries throughout Africa, popular elections have occasioned nationwide internet closures. Russia has broadly cracked down on internet freedoms in tandem with attacks on the media. And since the internet was introduced in the country, the Chinese government has used its vast powers to control its digital spaces and censure online speech.

The three or four internet outages began at around 4pm local time on Sunday, according to Marianne Díaz Hernández, a Chile-based Fellow at the digital rights group, Access Now. “This means that there are some places where there is no internet. It is too early for us to know precisely which places are affected but we do know that Havana and places where the protests were more significant yesterday were most affected.”

The rollout of digital connectivity across Cuba has been painfully slow since President Miguel Díaz-Canel took office in 2018. Díaz-Canel, the first Communist Party leader to hold the post outside of the Castro family, looked to increase access to the internet for ordinary Cubans. Since 2018, all Cubans have had access to mobile and Wi-Fi internet services via the state-owned telecommunication company ETECSA.  

The state tightly monitors Cuba’s digital spaces — the island has one of the lowest internet connectivity rates in the Western Hemisphere and connections are poor. The internet is also heavily censored and sites are blocked by the government. Freedom House, an organization that ranks political and digital freedoms around the world, gave Cuba a 22 out of 100 in its 2020 “Freedom on the Net” report. 

Díaz Hernández said the Cuban government’s grip on the internet mirrors other aspects of the Communist Party’s control throughout the country. “We need to remember that this is a small part of a larger structure of control,” she said. “That it is not just that the internet is controlled by the government, it's that everything is controlled by the government. Cubans cannot have independent businesses, they cannot make many decisions by themselves.” 

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of digital network solutions and intelligence, said he first saw declines in internet traffic on Sunday afternoon. He tweeted a graph showing a reduction in internet traffic in and out of Cuba. He said he initially wasn’t sure whether to ascribe the outages to technical difficulties being experienced by the Cuban government. 

“I don’t know if they are having technical problems or if they are trying to shut down portions of the country,” said Madory, who first began tracking internet availability in Cuba in 2013. “This year there have been a number of outages, nothing quite like this. All these shutdowns are new to Cuba. In Cuba, the internet has long been inaccessible, not a lot of people have had access to it, it’s censored.”

In a televised speech on Sunday afternoon, Diaz-Canel, who heads the Communist Party, blamed the unrest on the United States, which in recent years tightened its nearly 60-year-old trade embargo on Cuba. Diaz-Canel said that the protests were a form of “systemic provocation” by dissidents working with the U.S.

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