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Protesters in Cuba
After last month’s dubious anti-government protests in Cuba, U.S. policymakers now insist that the island is in dire need of Internet service—and that only the United States can supply it.
If Cuba were truly a censorial, backwards state in need of rescue from the U.S. tech industry, it wouldn’t have persistent, overwhelming support from its populace on issues like health care and education.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Ron DeSantis urged President Joe Biden in July to provide “free and open” Internet access for Cubans using technology engineered by U.S. tech firms like Google. Rubio, in his letter, cited the Cuban government’s “stranglehold on the Internet” after reports of a temporary web-access shutdown during the protests. Later in the month, the Biden Administration announced it was considering a plan to export Internet service to the country.
Yet, as Reese Erlich, the late journalist and former columnist of The Progressive, has observed, Internet service has been widely accessible in Cuba since 2018, thanks to technological strides made by the Cuban government despite a decades-long U.S. embargo. (In fact, Erlich found, the U.S. denies its citizens access to more websites than Cuba does.)
Why, then, would the Biden Administration bother?
Recent history offers a few clues. For decades, the U.S. government has created and disseminated counter-revolutionary propaganda through television and radio in defiance of Cuban sovereignty and international law. And within at least the last twelve years, Washington has orchestrated a series of clandestine campaigns to wrest control of the Internet in Cuba from the country’s government, aiming to foment anticommunist sentiment.
In 2009, for instance, the State Department-linked U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) recruited subcontractor Alan Gross to install “military-grade” Internet equipment that couldn’t be detected in Havana, a violation of Cuban law. The next year, USAID developed the Twitter-esque social media platform ZunZuneo in an effort to “build a Cuban audience . . . then push them toward dissent.”
By 2013, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, an imprint of the Congressionally funded U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), had implemented a cell phone service called Piramideo. The service dispensed text messages with news reports about anti-government demonstrations that, according to former Cuban diplomat Nestor Garcia, “never happened.”
More recently, USAGM has financed the virtual private network Psiphon, which the agency describes as an “anti-censorship technology.”
As The Guardian has reported, Cuban people who use a virtual private network through Psiphon are directed to a webpage for ADN Cuba, an anti-Castro news organization also funded by USAID.
In July, the paper said, thousands of anti-government Twitter accounts “were created in the days leading up to the protests.” Many of these accounts “used an automated system to retweet the hashtag five times a second” and were “linked to Atlas Network, a free-market consortium of more than 500 organisations that have received funding from ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers.”
U.S. media outlets, instead of contending with this reality, have heralded the prospect of a U.S.-hosted Cuban Internet. According to Bloomberg, Biden has the opportunity to bring “democracy” to Cuba via a U.S.-designed Internet service. Reason magazine sought to make “The Case for Beaming Internet Into Cuba,” arguing that “there’s little to lose, and much that could be gained—not just in Cuba, but in other fights against tyrannical regimes.”
Meanwhile, a Washington Post opinion piece mused that “beaming Internet to Cuba is the updated form of Cold War-era programs, and something the United States, given both its proximity and large Cuban exile population, should feel duty-bound to do.”
Dovetailing from these lofty assertions is the official U.S. narrative that Cuba “shut down,” “cracked down,” or “blocked” its Internet service during the protests—a declaration echoed by countless news outlets, including the Associated Press, NBC News, and NPR. Rubio, DeSantis, and other lawmakers portray this as a tactic of totalitarian censorship, contrary to the “democratic” values of the United States, and use it to bolster the case for intervention.
These statements appear to be hyperbolic. In an interview with MSNBC, Cuban official Carlos Fernandez de Cossio stated that the government didn’t interrupt Internet service as a whole; rather, he emphasized that any interruptions were sporadic and limited to specific services.
The tech news site Rest of World, which interviewed Cubans and data analysts about the issue, reported that the data on Internet service during the demonstrations was “difficult to parse” and could find no evidence that outages were intentional, rather than simply a result of equipment failures. Moreover, the organization Netblocks, a source that commonly appears in Western news stories about Internet shutdowns abroad, has come under scrutiny for its questionable methodology.
Further weakening the United States’ case is the fact that U.S.-helmed media projects in Cuba have rarely, if ever, succeeded. ZunZuneo was reportedly shuttered in 2012, and the U.S. government admits that the listenership of Radio Martí, its thirty-six-year-old Cuban broadcast, is “small.”
Relatedly, the news site Quartz notes that, because of a number of technical and legal “roadblocks,” Rubio’s and DeSantis’s plans are effectively impossible. Reason concedes that “signals could be jammed by the Cuban government. . . . Many Cubans’ cell phones might not be able to connect due to differences in network protocols.”
But there’s little moral utility in asking how, rather than why, the United States should attempt a Cuban Internet takeover. Technical critiques don’t suffice when the issue at hand—whether the United States has any business controlling the flow of information of another country, let alone one that has been punished with a violent blockade and countless destabilization attempts since the 1960s—is of such high stakes.
If Cuba were truly a censorial, backwards state in need of rescue from the U.S. tech industry, it wouldn’t have persistent, overwhelming support from its populace on issues like health care and education, nor, as of 2015, a 96 percent disapproval rating of the U.S. embargo.
Perhaps the narrative should be reframed: It’s not Cuba that seeks to silence and oppress the Cuban people, but the United States.