Cuba now scores just 19 out of 100 points on Freedom House's annual measure of internet freedom, a two-point fall from last year that erases a brief improvement and drags the island to its worst showing yet. The finding comes from the organization's Freedom on the Net 2026 report, released Thursday and covering the period from June 2025 to May 2026. It places Cuba among the most restrictive digital environments on earth, trailing only a handful of states and underscoring how blackouts, soaring costs, and state surveillance have combined to tighten control over what Cubans can see, say, and share online.
A Score Built on Scarcity and Fear
Freedom House's methodology breaks each country's total into three categories: obstacles to access, limits on content, and violations of user rights. Cuba managed only 5 of 25 possible points for access, 9 of 35 for content, and 5 of 40 for user rights - the lowest of the three, and the clearest signal of how dangerous online expression has become. The report attributes the decline to three intertwined forces: a worsening energy crisis that cripples infrastructure, a sharp rise in the cost of connectivity, and intensified prosecution of people who post or organize online.
The energy crisis is not an abstract backdrop. Nationwide blackouts during the period under review left an estimated 47.5 percent of mobile radio bases and 56.5 percent of telecommunications cabinets without power, since backup batteries typically last only a few hours. A major outage in March 2026 cut internet traffic by 65 percent, with full recovery taking roughly 29 hours. For ordinary Cubans, this means connectivity has become unpredictable by design as much as by circumstance - a population cannot organize, document abuses, or stay informed if the network itself is intermittently switched off by the conditions of the grid.
Paying More for Less
Access has also grown drastically more expensive. In May 2025, ETECSA, Cuba's sole mobile provider, capped peso-denominated reloads at 360 CUP a month, pushing users toward packages priced in foreign currency. Freedom House calculates this effectively multiplied the cost of mobile internet by a factor of 13 - a change that functions as a de facto filter, pricing out exactly the citizens most likely to rely on free, low-cost connectivity to organize or speak out. When a state controls the only telecommunications provider, pricing policy becomes a tool of political control just as surely as blocking or surveillance.
Prosecutions, Hacked Accounts, and Blocked Media
The report documents a pattern of lengthy prison sentences for social media activity, including a 14-year term for organizing protests online. Activist Alexander Verdecia received seven years for his posts; a journalist was sentenced to six years for protesting, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists; and in May 2026, Yasser García López was sentenced to five years over Facebook posts. These cases pushed down Freedom House's indicator measuring citizens' ability to mobilize online from three points to two.
Perhaps most troubling is Freedom House's assessment - explicitly framed as an analytical judgment rather than a judicial finding - that ETECSA "apparently facilitated" the hacking of social media accounts belonging to activists, opposition figures, and independent journalists. Because the state controls the network and the verification messages that travel across it, it is technically positioned to intercept authentication codes used to secure accounts, a vulnerability inherent to any system where the infrastructure provider and the political authority are the same entity. A January 2026 report from Prisoners Defenders, drawing on 200 testimonies, found that 98.5 percent of participants experienced reprisals tied to their digital activity, and nearly half reported unauthorized access to their own accounts. At least 23 independent Cuban news sites, including 14ymedio, CubaNet, Diario de Cuba, and El Toque, remained blocked throughout 2026.
Part of a Wider Global Retreat
Cuba's trajectory mirrors a broader pattern Freedom House describes in its report, titled "Seismic Shifts on the Global Internet": conditions worsened in 16 of the 38 countries assessed and improved in only eight, marking sixteen consecutive years of global decline in internet freedom. Kian Vesteinsson, the report's author and the organization's deputy director of research, warned that "authoritarian regimes are reshaping the internet as a system of control, deciding who can connect, what they can see, and if they can be heard," adding that democracies "must invest in making censorship fail." For Cuba, still ranked above only Russia and well behind China, Iran, and Myanmar among the countries surveyed, that fight remains distant - connectivity itself, let alone free expression, is increasingly a privilege rationed by the state.