Cuba's digital rights record has deteriorated further, according to Freedom House's annual Freedom on the Net report, released Thursday. The island scored 19 out of 100 points, two fewer than the previous year, confirming its status as a "Not Free" country and placing it among the worst-performing nations worldwide for online liberty.
The 2026 edition, titled "Seismic Shifts on the Global Internet" and covering June 2025 through May 2026, ranks Cuba just above Russia, which scored 16, and ahead of China, Iran, and Myanmar, each tied at 9 points, out of the 38 countries evaluated. The drop erases a modest gain recorded the previous year and marks a new recent low for the country.
A Score Built on Three Weak Pillars
Freedom House breaks its methodology into three categories: obstacles to access, limits on content, and violations of user rights. Cuba scored 5 out of 25 on access, 9 out of 35 on content restrictions, and a mere 5 out of 40 on user rights protections. That last figure is especially telling: it signals that Cubans who go online face serious risks simply for expressing themselves, with little legal recourse or institutional protection.
The report attributes the decline to three intertwined forces: a worsening energy crisis that cripples connectivity, a sharp rise in the cost of mobile data, and intensified repression of people who post critical content on social media.
Blackouts Choke Connectivity
Cuba's prolonged national power outages have had a direct and measurable effect on internet access. Backup batteries at telecommunications sites typically sustain networks for only a few hours, and documented data cited in the report indicate that outages have left roughly 47.5 percent of mobile radio bases and 56.5 percent of telecommunications cabinets out of service during the worst periods.
One blackout in March 2026 triggered a 65 percent collapse in internet traffic, with full recovery taking around 29 hours. For a population already navigating unreliable infrastructure, such disruptions amount to a form of de facto censorship: when the grid fails, so does the ability to communicate, organize, or access independent information.
Compounding the problem is affordability. In May 2025, state telecom monopoly ETECSA capped peso-based top-ups at 360 CUP per month and pushed users toward data packages priced in foreign currency, an effective 13-fold increase in the cost of mobile internet. For many Cubans, connectivity has shifted from a stretched necessity to an out-of-reach luxury.
Prison Sentences for Social Media Posts
Freedom House's indicator measuring citizens' ability to mobilize and campaign online fell from three points to two, reflecting a wave of harsh prison sentences, including one of 14 years, handed down to people who called for protests on social media during the reporting period. Among documented cases, activist Alexander Verdecia received seven years for his posts, while the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded a six-year sentence against a journalist for protest-related activity. In May 2026, Yasser García López was sentenced to five years in prison over Facebook posts.
The report also flags ETECSA's apparent role in facilitating the hacking of social media accounts and communications belonging to activists, opposition figures, and independent journalists, a finding serious enough to zero out the corresponding indicator entirely. Freedom House is careful to frame this as its own assessment rather than a judicial determination, noting that state control over network infrastructure and verification messages could 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 percent of participants reported reprisals tied to digital activity, with nearly half describing unauthorized access to their own accounts.
At least 23 independent Cuban news sites, including 14ymedio, CubaNet, Diario de Cuba, and El Toque, remained blocked from within the island throughout 2026.
Part of a Wider Global Retreat
Cuba's decline mirrors a broader pattern. Freedom House reports that global internet freedom has fallen for the sixteenth consecutive year, with conditions 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. He added that democracies "must lead the fight for a free and open internet," arguing that while dictatorships invest in keeping people disconnected, open societies must invest in making censorship fail.