Cuba's Internet: One Cable, One Company, Zero Redundancy

Cuba has just one submarine cable. One. For an island of 11 million people, every single byte of international internet traffic flows through a single fiber-optic connection — the ALBA-1 cable linking Havana to Venezuela. Our traceroute from Georgia to Cuba reveals not only this extraordinary vulnerability, but something genuinely puzzling: traffic reaches Cuba by way of São Paulo, Brazil. The packet travels southwest across the Atlantic before looping north through the Caribbean — a detour of thousands of extra kilometers. To understand why this happens, you need to understand the political and technical history of Cuban internet connectivity, one of the most unusual stories in the world of telecommunications.

The packet from Tbilisi reaches São Paulo in 236ms — crossing the Atlantic to Brazil rather than cutting straight to the Caribbean. From São Paulo it passes through Brasília before finally arriving in Cuba. Why Brazil? The answer lies in the architecture of ALBA-1 itself and in the geopolitics that brought it into existence.

ALBA-1: history and technical specifications

The ALBA-1 cable is a 1,630 km submarine fiber-optic system connecting Santiago de Cuba to La Guaira, Venezuela. It entered service in January 2013, ending Cuba's total dependence on satellite connectivity — but replacing that dependence with reliance on a single cable. The project was conceived as early as 2006–2007, but a series of technical setbacks, financing complications, and political delays pushed the launch back by nearly six years.

Construction was funded primarily through PDVSA, Venezuela's state oil company, under the oil-for-services bilateral framework that characterized the relationship between Hugo Chávez's Venezuela and Fidel Castro's Cuba. The total cost of the project has been estimated at approximately $70 million. The cable was laid by Chinese company Huawei Marine Networks (now HMN Technologies) — itself a politically significant choice, signaling Cuba's turn toward non-Western technology partners in the face of the US embargo.

Technically, ALBA-1 is a relatively modest system. Its design capacity is approximately 640 Gbps — an order of magnitude less than modern transoceanic cables, which routinely carry tens of terabits per second. The cable reaches depths of up to 7,000 meters in parts of the Caribbean Sea. Landing stations are located in Santiago de Cuba and in La Guaira on the outskirts of Caracas — Havana has no direct landing point, and traffic must be distributed across the island by terrestrial links from Santiago. Before ALBA-1, Cuba was the last country in the Western Hemisphere without a broadband submarine cable, relying entirely on geostationary satellites with 600ms-plus latency for everything.

Political context: why Venezuela?

The choice of Venezuela as ALBA-1's landing point was not a technical decision — it was political. It was a direct consequence of the special relationship between Havana and Caracas that developed in the 2000s under Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. Venezuela supplied Cuba with oil at preferential rates — roughly 100,000 barrels per day — while Cuba provided doctors, military advisors, and intelligence specialists in return. ALBA-1 was an organic part of this larger exchange.

The cable's name — an acronym for Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) — makes its political character explicit. This is not a commercial telecommunications project funded by operators and managed by an international consortium, as most submarine cables are. It is a piece of political infrastructure, built in the service of an ideological alliance between two states.

The consequences of that choice are still felt today. Following Chávez's death in 2013 and the onset of Venezuela's deepening political and economic crisis, the reliability of the country's infrastructure deteriorated sharply. Power outages, network instability, and equipment degradation in Venezuela directly affect Cuba's internet connection quality. When the lights go out in Caracas, Cuba risks losing its link to the world.

Why traffic routes through Brazil

ALBA-1 lands in Venezuela. Venezuela connects to the global internet primarily through South American carriers and the SAC (South America-1) and AMERICAS-II cable systems. Both cables have landing points in Brazil — primarily in Fortaleza and Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian operators, most notably Level 3 (now Lumen Technologies), provide transit for Venezuelan traffic through São Paulo, the largest telecommunications hub in South America.

The result is a routing path that looks almost paradoxical on a map: a packet from Europe to Cuba first travels southwest across the Atlantic to Brazil, then loops back north toward the Caribbean. This adds hundreds of milliseconds of unnecessary latency compared to what routing could look like if Cuba had a direct connection to any of the numerous cables passing close to its shores — systems like Columbus III, Maya-1, or Southern Cross.

Geographically, Cuba sits at the heart of the Caribbean, through which dozens of submarine cables connecting North America to Latin America and Europe pass. The island is literally surrounded by fiber-optic infrastructure — to which it has no connection. That is not a technical problem. It is a political one.

The Helms-Burton Act: how the embargo cut Cuba off from cables

The Helms-Burton Act of 1996 (formally, the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act) significantly expanded the scope of the US trade embargo against Cuba that had been in place since 1962. Among other things, it effectively bars US companies from participating in any projects involving Cuban telecommunications infrastructure — including the construction and operation of submarine cables with Cuban landing points.

Since American companies — AT&T, Verizon, Lumen/Level 3, Google, Meta, and others — participate in the consortia that build most transatlantic and trans-Caribbean cables, their involvement automatically excludes Cuba from consideration as a potential landing point. This is precisely why cables like Columbus III, which passes just a few dozen kilometers north of Cuba, route around the island entirely without touching it.

During the 2015–2016 diplomatic thaw under the Obama administration, serious discussions were held about the possibility of laying a cable between the United States and Cuba. Google even received a license from the US Department of Commerce to build a submarine cable to Cuba. But with the return to maximum-pressure policy under the Trump administration, those plans were shelved. Cuba remains the only major Caribbean nation without a direct cable connection to North America.

ETECSA: monopoly, control, and censorship

ETECSA (Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A.) is the island's sole telecommunications operator. The company is 100% state-owned and holds a monopoly over fixed and mobile telephony, internet access, and international communications. Every internet connection on the island — residential, corporate, governmental — passes through ETECSA's infrastructure and through ALBA-1.

This means total state control over internet traffic. ETECSA can at any moment throttle speeds, block specific websites or services, or cut off international access for the entire island — without a court order, without notice, without appeal. The Cuban internet is filtered: a number of foreign news outlets, human rights websites, and platforms are inaccessible without a VPN. Authorities periodically run campaigns against VPN services, blocking the most popular ones.

According to NetBlocks and OONI (Open Observatory of Network Interference), Cuba consistently ranks among the most tightly internet-controlled countries in the Western Hemisphere. The network architecture is such that not a single byte of international traffic can bypass the state operator's infrastructure — meaning the state sees, controls, and can sever everything, at will.

Life under a broken internet

According to the International Telecommunication Union, the share of internet users in Cuba long remained below 40%, while most Latin American countries register 70–80%. Average connection speeds in Cuba are among the lowest in the region. Mobile internet only arrived in December 2018 — more than a decade after smartphones became the norm in most of the world.

Before that, internet access was only possible through state-run WiFi hotspots (ETECSA hotspots) located in public squares and parks, where Cubans would queue to chat with relatives abroad via WhatsApp or make calls over Skype. That image — people gathered under the open sky, phones raised toward a spot of signal — became one of the defining symbols of Cuban digital isolation in the 2010s.

Today mobile internet is available through ETECSA's 3G and 4G networks. But prices remain high by Cuban standards: 1 GB of mobile data costs approximately 1–2 CUC against an average state-sector salary of around $30–50 per month. Many Cubans use internet sparingly — for voice calls and messages, not for video streaming or social media browsing.

El Paquete Semanal: internet on a USB drive

In response to the chronic shortage of internet access, Cubans created something unique — a digital content distribution system with no parallel anywhere in the world. El Paquete Semanal (The Weekly Package) is an archive of roughly 1 TB assembled each week by anonymous compilers and distributed across the island through a network of couriers and resellers on hard drives and USB sticks. The archive contains TV series, films, music, mobile apps, news, magazines, and even advertising — all of it completely bypassing the internet.

Various estimates suggest that El Paquete Semanal reaches between 3 and 5 million Cubans every week — nearly half the country's population. The cost of the package is about 1–2 CUC per week. The system operates in a legal gray area: technically it infringes on copyright, but for years the state turned a blind eye, since the system functioned as a pressure valve, easing social tension caused by the absence of normal internet access.

El Paquete Semanal is not simply piracy. It is a social phenomenon reflecting the resourcefulness and adaptability of Cuban society under chronic information isolation. Researchers from multiple countries have studied it as a unique example of decentralized information distribution under state control of communications — a de facto parallel media ecosystem for half a nation.

July 2021: when the state turns off the lights

On July 11, 2021, Cuba erupted in mass protests — the largest the island had seen in decades. Thousands took to the streets across the country, voicing frustration over shortages of food, medicine, electricity, and basic goods. Videos of the protests began circulating on social media in real time.

The government's response was swift: by July 11 itself, ETECSA had begun restricting access to social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram. On July 12, mobile internet was cut across most of the island. Full restoration of access took several days. According to NetBlocks, this was one of the most large-scale and well-documented internet shutdowns in the history of Latin America.

The 11J incident made one thing unmistakably clear: a single cable plus a state monopoly operator is not merely a technical vulnerability. It is an instrument of political control. Shutting down Cuba's internet requires no physical cable cut. It takes a single order to ETECSA.

Cuba's national intranet

Running alongside limited access to the global internet, Cuba has a developed national intranet — the Red Cubana. This is a closed infrastructure, accessible to all ETECSA users but not directly connected to the world wide web. It hosts Cuban state media, educational resources, the national search engine Cubana.cu, and a range of platforms for domestic use.

The Red Cubana is Cuba's version of a sovereign internet: users can exchange files, read news, and access government services within the national network without consuming international traffic (which is significantly more expensive). Some segments of this network continue to function even during a complete ALBA-1 outage — making them relatively resilient to external disruption, but simultaneously isolated from the global information environment.

Speeds, prices, and access

According to the Speedtest Global Index, average mobile download speeds in Cuba have historically ranged around 5–10 Mbps — roughly five to ten times slower than neighboring Jamaica or Mexico. Fixed broadband internet is accessible to only a small fraction of the population and is likewise characterized by low speeds and high prices.

One of the defining factors is latency. The routing through Venezuela and Brazil adds 200–300ms of delay on top of the baseline. For comparison: the ping from Havana to Miami over a direct cable — one that does not exist — would be under 20ms. The real ping from Havana to US servers, routed through São Paulo, sits at 250–300ms. This makes normal online gaming, low-latency video conferencing, and a range of other delay-sensitive applications essentially impractical for Cuban users.

Does Cuba have a chance at a second cable?

The question of a second submarine cable for Cuba comes up periodically in both Cuban and international technical publications. Technically, connecting the island to existing cable systems would not be difficult: Cuba sits within a few dozen kilometers of several active routes. Economically, the project would be justifiable: a market of 11 million people with unmet demand for connectivity is an attractive target for any investor.

The primary obstacle remains political. The US embargo excludes the world's largest cable operators from potential participation. European and Asian companies could theoretically build a cable to Cuba without violating US law — but the risk of secondary sanctions and the complexity of working with the Cuban side significantly dampens investor interest.

In 2023–2024, reports surfaced of negotiations between Cuba and several European and Asian companies about a possible new cable. None of those projects, however, moved into public announcement or financing. Cuba remains suspended from a single fiber-optic thread, and in the near term, that is unlikely to change.

Monitoring status

• Current RTT: 277ms   Route: Tbilisi → Sofia → São Paulo → Brasília → Cuba
• Operator: Level 3 → BR.Digital Telecom
• Key vulnerability: Cuba's entire international internet depends on ALBA-1 landing in Venezuela