The United States and the Digital War against Cuba, a brief History

Rosa Miriam Elizalde, Resumen, September 5, 2024 — 

Only once, that we know of, has the U.S. government publicly admitted that it has been the one boycotting Cuba’s access to the Internet. In November 2022, the Department of Justice recommended to the Federal Communications Commission the denial of a permit for the island to link to the submarine cable that interconnects Caribbean countries with the American continent.

The argument was ridiculous. It cited the alleged danger of Cuba’s relations with other foreign adversaries such as China or Russia, which could use the island as a gateway to hack into the U.S. network.

The Arcos-1 network, which passes 32 kilometers from Havana and has been active for more than two decades, connects 24 Internet hotspots in 15 countries on the continent, most of them with long-standing relations with foreign adversaries that unveil Washington.

No one connects to the Internet by invoking magic words. At least three conditions are required: the telecommunications network, the computers or electronic equipment that will dialogue with their peers in the world and a culture of use of these technologies. If you live on an island, you need submarine cables to link to continental networks more than anywhere else. In fact, 99 percent of data traffic around the world, onshore or off, travels through underwater cables, mostly fiber optic, totaling more than a million kilometers.

The Internet was conceived as a network where information travels through alternative paths, to ensure the vitality of data circulation. Its birth is due to the order issued in 1962 by President John Kennedy, after the so-called October Crisis or Missile Crisis, which showed the vulnerability of unidirectional command and control systems in the event of a nuclear attack. However, network redundancy is more limited today than when the Internet first emerged, because almost all fiber optic cables lead to the United States, where the backbone of the network is located.

This unbalanced structure of the cables that make up the Internet means that any information transmitted from Latin America to Europe, even if it is sent from a service in Patagonia and from local servers, almost always passes through the NAP of the Americas, located in Miami. In addition, the large fiber optic pipes that cross the oceans are owned by a handful of corporations linked to the intelligence services, as shown in his revelations by former U.S. intelligence agent Edward Snowden.

Therefore, it is not Cuba that has a long and documented tradition of hacking, spying and control of the Internet. Without going any further, a joint research report published in September 2023 by China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center and the Internet security company Qihoo 360 Technology, accuses the U.S. National Security Agency of having directed more than 10,000 cyber attacks against China, with the theft of 140 gigabytes of relevant data.

It is impossible to prove that Cuba is a cybersecurity threat under these conditions. What is relevant here is that the Department of Justice admits for the first time, through a bureaucratic recommendation, that Washington prevents the connection to the submarine cable, so perhaps someday they will recognize that among their many blockades of the island is also the impossibility of acquiring information technology and the enormous difficulties to access digital services.

It is worth reviewing the main milestones of the U.S. digital war against Cuba, to understand the twisted underbelly of this story. While Europe and most Latin American countries began to connect to the Internet in the mid-80s of the last century, Cuba was subjected for more than a decade to a policy of “route filtering” of the National Science Foundation (NCF) that blocked links to and from the island in U.S. territory.

During the “Special Period” – the crisis that followed the collapse of the socialist processes in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s – the situation changed dramatically. The United States calculated that the days of socialism in Cuba were numbered and opted for a “digital glasnost”, with a U.S. propaganda pipeline that would facilitate the desired regime change in Cuba that Washington has been betting on for more than 60 years.

Since 1996 and thanks to a regulation known as the Torricelli Law or Law for Democracy in Cuba, it was possible to connect the island to the Internet, but only to access information content, because there are strict limits to the services that a Cuban user can enjoy. The Democratic and Republican administrations kept these policies in place, although Donald Trump applied a strategy of “maximum pressure” to suffocate the Cuban economy, which has been maintained by the government of Joseph Biden. Both presidents have encouraged segments of the Cuban ultra-right in the United States, who actively participated in the creation of private and public groups on Facebook, the most popular platform on the island, to intoxicate the national public agenda.

It has been documented that these groups incited the July 2021 protests in Cuba, the most massive in recent memory in the Caribbean country. U.S. researcher Alan Macleod infiltrated one of these groups and proved that the main inciters of the riots in San Antonio de los Baños, the city where the revolts began, reside in Florida. “The involvement of foreign nationals in Cuba’s internal affairs is at a level that is hardly conceivable in the United States,” Macleod wrote in MintPress News, October 2021.

Any researcher can find sufficient evidence of the U.S. government’s role in the #SOSCuba campaign, which generated thousands of retweets in the days leading up to and during the July 11, 2021 protests. It was initiated and amplified by operators linked to organizations that receive funding from the federal government. From January 2017 through September 2021, at least 54 groups that operated programs in Cuba have been documented as receiving funding from the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). These programs last from one to three years and the amounts range from half a million to 16 million dollars. The White House continually boasts of its efforts to identify, recruit, train, fund and deploy individuals and organizations to promote political change inside the island.

Today 7.5 million Cubans (more than 70 percent of the population) are connected to the Internet, but they cannot view Google Earth, use the Zoom videoconferencing system, download free Microsoft software, shop on Amazon, or purchase international domains that appear to favor tourism to the island, to name a few of the more than 200 blocked services and applications. When Internet providers detect an access from Cuba, these companies, whether they are in California, Madrid, Paris or Toronto, act as a funnel and warn that the user is connecting from a “forbidden country”.

As part of its policy for “regime change” in Cuba, the U.S. government, in full bipartisan alignment, has intensified in recent years the use of information manipulation techniques in correspondence with the rapid deployment of the new communication paradigm, the dominance it exercises over global algorithmic platforms and the identification of opportunities and weaknesses in Cuban society during the process of transition to the digital scenario.

It has prioritized the allocation of financial, technological and human resources for subversive purposes and has adopted measures in the regulatory framework of the blockade to facilitate the deployment of the communicational component in the unconventional war against Cuba, all of which increasingly reinforces the characteristic instruments of cognitive warfare, according to the conceptual denomination elaborated by academic, military and political sectors.

Meanwhile, the Cuban authorities have become aware of the colossal challenge that this new scenario represents for national security and defense, for which reason they have called for a greater political and communicational mobilization and the cohesive action of the State and all the people to counteract it.

Therefore, the public statement of the Department of Justice that clearly states that it is the U.S. government that prevents the connection of the island to the Arcos-1 network linking the Caribbean countries is almost welcome. Perhaps in this way Washington will be encouraged to recognize that it has been and continues to be the number one enemy of the Cubans’ access to the Internet. (Conference at the Vietnam-Cuba Seminar. Socialist Press in Transformation).

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Rosa Miriam Elizalde is the First Vice President of UPEC. Cuban journalist and editor, PhD in Communication Sciences and professor at the University of Havana. She was the Founder and editor of the digital weekly La Jiribilla and the online newspaper Cubadebate.