“Cuba is not the country with a long, verifiable tradition of hacking, espionage and control,”claims a speaker at an official press seminar.
14ymedio, Madrid, 7 September 2024 — The Castro regime cut off 14ymedio’s internet access, the first time it has taken such action since this independent media outlet first began more than ten years ago. It did the same to all the country’s independent news outlets – Martí Noticias, Diario de Cuba, CiberCuba, CubaNet – which now cannot be accessed on the island without a VPN, something available only on State Security devices. However, Cubadebate, the country’s primary state-run news website, went online Saturday with its usual complaint that the United States is waging a “cyber war,” preventing Cubans from having full access to the internet.
“Today, 7.5 million Cubans (more than 70% of the population) are connected to the internet but cannot view Google Earth, use the Zoom videoconferencing system, download free Microsoft software, shop on Amazon, or acquire international domains that appear to favor tourism to the island, not to mention some of the more than 200 blocked services and applications,” Cubadebate highlights in its cover summary. “When Internet providers detect access from Cuba — whether these companies are in California, Madrid, Paris or Toronto — they act as a funnel and warn users that they are connecting through a ‘prohibited country.’”
The article coincides with a conference at a bilateral seminar between Vietnam and Cuba and “Socialist Press in Transformation” held on Thursday in Havana. It claims the U.S. has blocked Cuban access to the internet and has, at least once, publicly admitted doing so. This is a reference to a recommendation by the U.S. Department of Justice to the Federal Communications Commission in November 2022 to deny Cuba access to ARCOS-1, the fiber optic cable network that connects Caribbean countries to the continent.
Cuban officials claim that the 11 July 2021 protests were incited by “segments of the Cuban far-right in the United States, which actively participated in the creation of private groups
“The argument was ridiculous,” they claim. “It cited the alleged danger of Cuba’s relations with other foreign adversaries such as China or Russia, which could use the island as a gateway to hack the U.S. network.”
At the time, the then Deputy Attorney General for National Security, Matthew G. Olsen, defended the claim, saying, “As long as the Cuban government remains a counterintelligence threat to the United States and is allied with others who do the same, the risks to our infrastructure are simply too great.”
Without referring to this statement, the article states that ARCOS-1 passes twenty miles from Havana and has been in operation for more than two decades, connecting twenty-four landing points in fifteen countries in the region, most of which have “long-standing, fluid relations with foreign adversaries that keep Washington awake at night.”
Recounting a history of the internet, pro-government journalist Rosa Miriam Elizalde said, “It was conceived as a network in which information travels through alternative paths to guarantee the vitality of the circulation of data,” adding that it has more limitations today than when it was created. “Almost all the fiber optic cables lead to the United States. Additionally, the large fiber optic pipes that cross the oceans are the property of a handful of corporations linked to the intelligence services.”
“Cuba is not the country with a long, verifiable tradition of hacking, espionage and control,” Elizalde later claimed. She failed to mention the monopoly the regime maintains on access to information through the state-owned telecommunications company Etecsa or the periodic connectivity “blackouts” strategically imposed following certain events such as the massive protests of 11 July 2021.
The speaker did refer to this crucial date, but denounced that they were incited by “segments of the Cuban far right in the United States, who actively participated in the creation of private and public groups on Facebook, the most popular platform on the Island, to poison the national public agenda.”
Ignoring the fact that there are U.S. initiatives that have specifically sought to establish an internet connection for the island, nor the state of the issue today, Elizalde mentioned no less than three times the Department of Justice’s decision from two years ago. She concluded, “Perhaps by this path Washington will be encouraged to recognize that it has been and continues to be Cuba’s number one enemy of Cubans in terms of internet access.”
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