The special municipality remains an island within another island, without mobile service and with landlines limited to local calls.
14ymedio, Havana, September 10, 2026 – Two days after the two main telecommunications routes connecting the Isle of Youth with the rest of Cuba were damaged, the special municipality remains practically cut off. Mobile phones remain without service, and functioning landlines only allow local calls, while the state telecommunications monopoly, Etecsa, has still not explained what happened or when it expects to fully restore the connection.
The uncertainty even reaches those who call the company directly seeking information. This newspaper contacted Etecsa’s customer service this Thursday to ask when communications with the Isle of Youth would be restored. “We still don’t have a date; stay informed through the official channels,” an operator responded.
The outage turns the territory into an island within another island, this time digitally as well. Its residents can communicate with one another through the landlines that remain operational, but cannot call the rest of the country. They also have no mobile telephone service, and internet access has been interrupted.
The disconnection came, moreover, after local authorities had boasted about a modest expansion of internet access. The Citizen’s Portal of the Isle of Youth celebrated the installation of a new Wi-Fi zone in Nueva Gerona, in a park next to the roundabout on 41st Street, as a way to “increase internet connectivity options for the islanders.” Shortly afterward, the breakdown left the entire territory without mobile service.
The company limited itself to specifying that they are “maritime links” and that its specialists are working together with Geocuba employees to repair them under “complex conditions”
Etecsa reported this Tuesday that “the two main connection routes” linking the special municipality to the national network had suffered damage. The company limited itself to specifying that they are “maritime links” and that its specialists are working together with Geocuba employees to repair them under “complex conditions.” The state monopoly said it had enabled alternative connections to keep local authorities in communication, but announced no similar solution for the population.
The situation has also prompted criticism on social media. “If there is an outage and the problem is even greater, what alternatives are there for this type of problem? There aren’t any, it’s that simple, because they base telecommunications on only one type of infrastructure,” wrote Arian Cáceres on Facebook, calling for the population to be authorized to use other forms of access to communications. “That would be an alternative,” he added.
Many of the complaints multiplying on social media come from Cubans living abroad or outside the Isle of Youth who suddenly lost communication with their relatives. They are the ones asking most insistently when calls and internet access will return, faced with the impossibility of even knowing how their relatives are doing.
The isolation is even more paradoxical because the rest of Cuba does not exactly enjoy good communications either. Power outages have now become internet and telephone outages in numerous territories. Etecsa has acknowledged that electrical failures and difficulties with the backup generators supporting its facilities are causing increasingly serious disruptions to the mobile network.
In 2008, Etecsa connected the Isle of Youth to the national network through a submarine fiber-optic cable
The current disconnection also contrasts with what happened exactly 18 years ago. In 2008, Etecsa connected the Isle of Youth to the national network through a submarine fiber-optic cable. The infrastructure went into operation practically on the eve of Hurricane Gustav, which struck the territory on August 30 of that year as a Category 4 storm, with winds exceeding 200 kilometers per hour.
Gustav devastated the island. It knocked down utility poles, communications towers, homes, and electrical networks, leaving devastation that the authorities themselves compared at the time to a nuclear explosion. However, the new fiber connection made it possible to maintain the link with the rest of the country amid the disaster. The official press celebrated the success with an unequivocal headline: “Communication Never Failed.”
Now a Gustav was not necessary. With no cyclone over the Gulf of Batabanó and no comparable weather event, the two main maritime routes have been damaged. The company has not explained how it happened, whether both failures have the same cause, or what kind of redundancy exists between the connections.
Both episodes present a disturbing picture of the vulnerability of infrastructure that should be considered strategic
The fragility of communications adds to another recent blow against an essential infrastructure facility in the special municipality. Last week it became known that unknown individuals had stolen all the equipment from the Isle of Youth’s seismological station, inaugurated in 2024 and linked to Cuba and the Caribbean’s earthquake and tsunami monitoring system.
The thieves took the solar panels, batteries, seismometer, digitizer, and the rest of the equipment. “They left nothing,” lamented Enrique Arango Arias, head of the National Seismological Service, who went so far as to ask that the incident not be considered a simple theft but rather sabotage because of the consequences for an alert system of national importance.
There is so far no evidence linking that looting to the current telecommunications failure. Both incidents, however, present a disturbing picture of the vulnerability of infrastructure that should be considered strategic.
Eighteen years after the official press celebrated that not even Gustav had managed to cut communications, the Isle of Youth once again discovers the literal dimension of its double insularity.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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