Cuba now ranks among the three worst countries in the world for internet freedom, according to Freedom House's newly released Freedom on the Net 2026 report. The island scored just 19 out of 100 points, down two from last year, trailing only China, Iran, and Myanmar - each tied at 9 points - among the 38 nations surveyed. The finding confirms what many Cubans already experience daily: a connection that is costly, unstable, and watched.
A Score Built on Scarcity and Fear
Freedom House's methodology breaks national scores into three pillars: obstacles to access, limits on content, and violations of user rights. Cuba scored poorly across all three - 5 out of 25, 9 out of 35, and 5 out of 40, respectively. That distribution tells a coherent story. It is not merely that Cubans struggle to get online; once connected, what they can say and whether they can say it without consequence are just as constrained. The report, titled "Seismic Shifts on the Global Internet" and covering June 2025 through May 2026, ties the decline to three converging pressures: an energy crisis that has crippled telecommunications infrastructure, a sharp rise in the cost of mobile data, and intensified prosecution of people who organize or speak out online.
When the Grid Fails, So Does the Network
Cuba's prolonged blackouts have done more than darken homes - they have severed digital lifelines. Mobile towers and switching equipment rely on backup batteries that last only a few hours once the power grid fails, and documented outages reportedly knocked out close to half of mobile radio bases and well over half of telecommunications cabinets during the worst periods. A single blackout in March 2026 reportedly cut national internet traffic by 65 percent, with full recovery taking roughly 29 hours. For a population already starved of bandwidth, this is not an inconvenience; it is a recurring information blackout that isolates communities precisely when accurate information matters most.
Paying More to Say Less
Economic policy has compounded the infrastructure crisis. ETECSA, Cuba's state-run and only mobile provider, capped peso-based reloads at 360 CUP a month in 2025, pushing users toward packages priced in foreign currency. The practical effect was a reported thirteenfold jump in the cost of mobile internet for many Cubans - a price shock that functions as a de facto filter, pricing out casual use, sustained organizing, or access to independent news sources hosted abroad.
Surveillance, Prosecution, and a Shrinking Space to Organize
The report's sharpest findings concern state repression of online speech. Freedom House lowered Cuba's score on citizens' ability to mobilize digitally, citing lengthy prison sentences - including one of 14 years - for people who used social media to organize protests. Individual cases cited include activist Alexander Verdecia, sentenced to seven years over social media posts, a journalist given six years for protest-related activity, and Yasser García López, sentenced in May 2026 to five years for Facebook posts. Freedom House also states that ETECSA "apparently facilitated" the hacking of activists', journalists', and opposition figures' accounts - a judgment based on its own research rather than a court ruling, but one made plausible by the state's control over verification codes and network infrastructure. A separate January 2026 study by Prisoners Defenders, drawing on 200 testimonies, 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, and Diario de Cuba, remain blocked.
Part of a Larger Pattern
Cuba's decline mirrors a global trend Freedom House has now tracked for sixteen consecutive years: internet freedom worldwide continues to erode, with conditions worsening in 16 of the 38 countries studied this cycle and improving in only eight. As the report's author, Kian Vesteinsson, put it, authoritarian governments are increasingly treating the internet "as a system of control, deciding who can connect, what they can see, and if they can be heard." For Cuba, that control now extends from the power grid to the courtroom - leaving citizens to pay more, see less, and risk prison for speaking up.