There is only one reason to block access to social networks and messaging applications. Julie Chung wrote on her Twitter account: Fear.US Under Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

The official stressed that the Cuban regime is afraid of what the people say. “afraid of the truth”accuse.

In his message, heA Joe Biden official expressed admiration for Cuban dictator Miguel Diaz-Canel and the Minister of Communications of the Republic of Cuba, Mayra Arevich Marin, for ensuring that the message reached its recipient: order.

General Also Attach his statement with the hashtag #UnblockCuba, a trend on Twitter to demand the lifting of the ban on mobile data and internet access across the island.

Cutting off electricity and blocking the Internet is a tool that the regime usually resorts to to suppress protests: the goal is not to share any video or invitation, moreover, the world does not know what is happening there. Secrecy has allowed it to survive decades of Castro’s brutal dictatorship and Since July 11, when a wave of spontaneous protests took the world by surprise, the regime has once again put the strategy into practice and suspended communications on the island.

since then, The system limited access to both fixed and mobile Internet and used other methods to filter online contentWith Chinese-made technology, Gaspar Pisano of the digital rights group Access Now said. “They remove people’s ability to use mobile data by canceling their SIM cards, censoring hashtags, and blocking messages on VPN,” he said.

President Joe Biden said last Thursday that The White House is reviewing whether the US government can help Cubans restore access to the Internet. They have cut off access to the Internet. “We are looking at whether we have the technological capacity to restore that access,” he said during a news conference. One idea put forward by experts is to send balloons using portable WiFi, a measure taken during natural disasters.

To circumvent restrictions on the Internet, activists turn to a variety of resources, including virtual private networks (VPNs), “meshed networks” that connect groups of computers, and techniques to mask their activities, but none of them are widely used. .

The role of social media

This week, human rights activist Manuel Cuesta Morissa from Cuba confirmed that Social networks have played a fundamental role in the historical protests against the Castro regime which started on July 11th. The internet cuts implemented by the dictatorship were not enough to calm the island’s citizens who were already ferocious in the streets demanding their rights and freedoms.

Networks made the difference. The internet made the difference in the sense that for the first time there were protests from east to west. This is the first time in the history of Cuba that there have been no such widespread protests. Huge, deep and popular, and what we saw was thanks to the networks,” Cuesta crossed at a forum held via the social network Twitter Space held by the Argentine organization Centro para la Apertura y el Desarrollo de América Latina (CADAL).

Cuesta, said the internet cut on the island occurred between one and two hours after the protests began, and the announcement. The reset was unstable.

The activist, who was also arrested during the early days of the demonstrations, explained how they found out what is going on in the various cities of the country.: We learned this because young people from different parts of the city started arriving at the police station. They became our reporters. They kept us updated, we learned from them at night that even in Pinar del Rio there were demonstrations. ”

Journalists and other spokespersons based on the island of Cuba were expected to participate in the digital event, but Due to failures and instability in their internet services, they were unable to connect.

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