Thanks to connectivity, Cubans feel like citizens of the world
14ymedio, Yoani Sánchez, Generation Y, Havana, 3 June 2025 – Cuba hasn’t felt this much popular outrage since the economic shock at the beginning of 2021 that buried the convertible peso, sent food costs through the roof, and plunged wages. Now, with internet connection prices rising as of last Friday, social outrage has erupted again, this time against the state-owned telecommunications monopoly Etecsa. In a country already starved for food due to prolonged blackouts, making the escape represented by connecting to social media more expensive has been too much for people to bear.
The discontent is not limited by age or economic class. Complaining are teenagers, digital natives, who find social contact in WhatsApp groups, which is so difficult for them on nights without electricity and overpriced recreational venues. Anger is knocking on the door of university students, who are forced to consult most of their bibliography online, given the decrepitude of school library archives. The unease extends to working-age adults, who, through remote work, have found a way to contribute to their diminished family coffers and also to apply for scholarships, courses, or visas to leave the island. Retirees have also expressed their discomfort, as many of them are forced to maintain contact with their emigrated children and grandchildren through weekly video conferences.
Retirees have also expressed their discomfort, many of whom are forced to maintain contact with their emigrated children and grandchildren through weekly video conferences.
No one has been blind to the impact on Cuban wallets of the reductions in service and increases in web browsing rates per gigabyte (GB) in national currency. Neither the explanations from Etecsa officials nor the calls for understanding the infrastructure crisis facing the state monopoly have served to silence the critics. The company is among Cubans’ most poorly rated entities, a sad privilege it shares with the Electricity Union, State Security, and the Ministries of Transportation and Domestic Trade. Just mention the six letters of the telephone company’s name and its customers’ faces transform into grimaces of disgust and rejection.
The official explanation for increasing the price of per gigabyte by 1,229%, or, in other words, multiplying it by 13, lies in the need to raise foreign currency to invest in the country’s disastrous telecommunications infrastructure. By favoring top-ups paid for abroad, the state monopoly seeks to raise dollars that will allow it to buy cables, new telecommunications towers, and backup batteries to maintain service when the power goes out. The argument might have worked a few years ago, but Cubans have grown weary of their depreciated currency, of the privileges accorded to those with those greenbacks bearing the faces of Washington or Lincoln, and of a state that increasingly ignores those who only have access to the national peso.
“Soon they’ll be putting a portion of the electricity bill to be paid by the exiles from abroad,” reads the caption of one of the many Etecsa posts on Facebook that have sparked thousands of comments, most of them rejecting what has already been popularly dubbed the tarifazo*. “All this has happened because the money raised hasn’t been invested in telephone service, but in repression,” warns another internet user, who complains that in his small town in the province of Pinar del Río, he has to climb onto his roof in the early hours of the morning to get a precarious internet connection. “New cars for the police, but few resources to improve the connection,” he added with annoyance.
“New cars for the police but few resources to improve the connection,” he added with annoyance.
A distant observer of the Cuban situation would soon wonder why the rise in internet access prices has managed to mobilize citizens in a way that prolonged power outages and paltry salaries have not. In a country where official propaganda remains suffocating and the regime tries to control every aspect of daily life, access to the web has become a balm and a way to escape the daily crisis. Thanks to connectivity, Cubans feel like citizens of the world. Social media is that window that lets them know that there is something beyond the empty markets and the surveillance of the political police. It helps them to believe that there is hope.
On 11 July 2021, a few months after the Ordering Task was decreed, the island’s streets were filled with thousands of people shouting “Freedom!” We must be attentive to the reaction, in the short-term, of Etecsa’s current whim, which is already generating so much indignation.
*Translator’s note: The “azo” ending in Cuban Spanish is a ’magnifier’, in this case, roughly: “the gigantic price increase thing”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on DW and is republished with the author’s license.
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