Cuba Introduction As a one-party communist state, Cuba has no political pluralism, suppresses dissent, and severely restricts freedom of the press, assembly, speech, and association. The government controls virtually all media outlets in Cuba and restricts access to outside information. The small number of independent media outlets that do operate in the country are deemed illegal and considered “enemy propaganda”. Access to the internet has historically been very limited and most citizens can still only access the government-controlled national intranet. Despite gradual improvements to the infrastructure, the service is still inaccessible or slow and unreliable for most Cubans, as well as continuously subjected to monitoring (Freedom House, 2019). It is also unaffordable to most citizens. Since 2008 home access was primarily available for an elite, but remained constrained for most Cubans, who bought “a scratch-off phone card and surfed on a cut-rate smartphone” from Wi-Fi public spots (Faiola, 2019). In December 2018 3G mobile telephone service was introduced. Nevertheless, it is still not affordable for the vast population, with the cheapest package costing $7 per month, while the median monthly income is $44 (Faiola, 2019). Most recent developments in 2019 include the legalization of the extension of public Wi-Fi hotspots to private homes and small businesses, a recognition of access that was already available through clandestine private networks (CPJ Central & South America Staff, 2019). However, it is forbidden to disseminate “information contrary to the social interest, morals, good manners, and integrity of people” on public networks and host websites “on servers located in a foreign country” (CPJ Central & South America Staff, 2019). Dissent and criticism (both on- and offline) are suppressed and punished by the state. Cuba remains one of the most unconnected and repressive countries with regard to communication and information technologies. A recent study by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) found forty-one blocked sites on the island’s internet, while foreign internet services remain virtually inaccessible (Xynou et al., 2017). Nevertheless, Cuba differs from other repressive regimes as its main strategy to keep citizens away from unwanted content is to make the required technology unavailable, rather than employing sophisticated blocking techniques. They do, however, have a fairly well-developed system to filter domestic SMS for messages containing words such as “democracy”, “dictatorship”, or “human rights”. Additionally, the Cuban government tries to control the online public narrative by launching copy-cat versions of global services such as Wikipedia, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter. This way, citizens are only exposed to highly curated versions of each page: in 2010 the Cuban Wikipedia Ecured was launched, in 2013 a Cuban Facebook La Tendedera followed, in 2015 a blogging page known as Reflejos was launched, and in 2018 ToDus, the national version of WhatsApp. Most applications are specially developed for the national intranet by the Computer Science University (Freedom House, 2019), which has been identified as being involved in computational propaganda operations. At the same time, circumvention of government restrictions by independent digital media and citizens has also acquired new dimensions and scope. 108