Actual story is that in a socialist system like Cuba's, the internet is a state run service. The Cuban government prioritizes broadband internet access to schools and workplaces, so private internet hookups are pretty rare. Anecdotally, when I was in Cuba Cubans would crowd around public wifi hotspots for good internet access, since their ability to do so at home was lackluster at best. You can see a list of the 1000+ wifi hotspots here. That said, they definitely have internet access (so long as you have a smartphone or computer, however) and as of 2018 (so after I was there, haven't seen this on the ground myself) Cubans can get 3G and 4G internet on their phones. According to Cuban news around 7 million Cubans (a little over 60%) have internet, 4.2 million of those through mobile, and Western media backs up those numbers.

As the state has control over the internet within Cuba, it wouldn't surprise me if they cut off access to social media during times of increased dissent and foreign meddling. As the example of China shows, cultivating home grown social media vs. things like Facebook and Twitter (which can be easily astroturfed by foreign actors) is a great way to counter the traditional color revolution route pursued by Western imperialist powers. That said, Cuban internet is rickety, so it wouldn't surprise me either if a lot of the outages are just because usage spiked and then blew everything up, or a combination of both. You can even check out the usage stats here and you'll see a massive spike when the protests start. That would definitely cause an outage! Likewise, you can see form this usage data that the internet has not been "turned off" in the slightest—in fact, usage is still higher than it was before the protests began.

I know if I was an embattled communist regime next to the world's largest and most dangerous imperialist power I'd be pulling the plug on Facebook and keeping that plug pulled a la the Great Firewall indefinitely.

There is no such thing as free speech. Even here we are under private censorship. As most major networks and media are privately owned and controlled. Meaning that they aren’t going to post stories or let news run that doesn’t benefit them, tell a side of the story that goes against them, or doesn’t fit their narrative.

“State” suppression of free speech is present in socialist countries, but you need to look at the conditions inside of them. If you successfully pulled off a revolution and are building socialism, why would you allow reactionaries, counter revolutionaries, and foreign capitalist powers the ability to build discontent and gain the ability to challenge you?

The US goverment actually suppresses free speech and cuts off the internet via their abuse of their control of ICANN. Even recently, as someone here pointed out, the English and other foreign-language websites of Cuba's official newspaper, Granma, had their sites de-listed and no longer accessible from the URL (one would need to know the actual IP address to connect).

Cuba will arrest you for protesting with dissenting ideas, and lobbying for protestors freedom is a lot of what Cuban anarchists do.

That said, you're also allowed to be in an opposition political group, and there are liberal parties and anarchist libraries and everything.

It's not a "criticize the government and disappear" type situation, but it's also not the near total freedom of speech that the American labor movement and new left won.

Someone linked this here a few days ago, but here's a good documentary on Cuba's internet/infranet infrastructure.

tl;dw: Cuba's internet is, as far as I can tell from here, uncensored and open but your access is linked to your national ID (and also pretty expensive) so if you're browsing a bunch of reactionary content you're likely to get in trouble. Also WoW is universal, uncritical support to bootleg private Cuban WoW servers.

I never saw any evidence of it while I was there. the guiding principle for political speech was along the lines of "everything is debatable within the revolution, nothing is allowed outside." which seems pretty permissive to me. like you could advocate for neoliberal reforms if you want, so long as you aren't saying the revolution needs to be literally rolled back and give all the property back to US corporate interests, repeal the constitution, and reformulate the Batista government with a bunch of Miami psychos.

Having watched a video about gaming in Cuba, there's limits on their internet and what they look at is watched, I'm assuming the censorship is against reactionary content. But Cuba does have a thriving intranet with it's own social media along with gaming. As for free speech being suppressed, again I'd imagine hate speech and counterrevolutionary reactionary speech is very frowned upon.

It’s seems like there was some restrictions for like a day or two. Some sites were not working others were.

Apparently Cuba restricted Facebook but Twitter was working fine. This information comes from some traffic monitoring sites.

It’s kinda funny, Every article makes point to point out this probably/maybe forced real Cubans to send pictures/stories to gusanos in Florida to repost on their timeline.

This is totally, probably why 95% of the #soscuba posts originated in America from brand new accounts. It totally was not a fucking obvious bot op.

:cia:

Weird how its so hard to say, simply because we make travel to and reporting from the country so fucking difficult.

I can't comment on Cuba, but your coworker must know how easy it is to publicly discuss violently overthrowing the United States government on the internet. I'm sure that there would be zero consequences if he did this on his Facebook account.

Well the US does both.

I remember the internet being fairly decent when i was last there. I didn't use it much because i was having too much fun outdoors, but still had access to twitter amd facebook. Had to buy a card to access it, though.