But authoritarian regimes aren’t the only ones
getting into the act. India routinely shuts down
the internet during times of unrest. Toker
of NetBlocks said the imposition of internet
restrictions in Cuba follows an emerging
global pattern and not always in the countries
you most expect them, such as a recent
Nigerian cutoff of Twitter. On the plus side, he
said, the world is much more aware of these
incidents because it’s easier to monitor and
report them remotely.
Last Sunday, all of Cuba went offline for less
than 30 minutes, after which there were
several hours of intermittent but large
outages, said Doug Madory of Kentik, a
network management company. He said large
internet outages were very rare in Cuba until
very recently.
“There was an outage in January just for
mobile service following the ‘27N’ protests,”
Madory said, referring to a movement of
Cuban artists, journalists and other members
of civil society who marched on the Ministry of
Culture on Nov. 27, 2020, demanding freedom
and democracy.
Henken said he doesn’t believe the
government would shut off access for an
extended period of time, even though that is
its go-to tactic for dissidents and activists.
“The problem they have now is that it’s not a
handful of activists or artists or independent
journalists — it’s now a massive swath of the
population all throughout the country,” he
said. “So the genie is out of the bottle. They’re
trying to put it back in.”