History of Censorship in Cuba

DESCRIPTION: The largest island in the Caribbean and the only communist nation in the Western Hemisphere.

SIGNIFICANCE: State monopolization of all mass communication methods has ensured ideological compliance since Fidel Castro took power in 1959.

Censorship has taken a variety of forms throughout Cuba’s complex cultural history. Until the late nineteenth century, Cuban law was mandated by Spanish colonial authorities. Cuba’s war for independence from Spain was spearheaded by efforts to gain full political and civil rights for all Cubans. On October 10, 1868, Cuban rebel leaders issued a manifesto that included demands for freedom of expression. Freedom finally came after the Spanish-American War (1898). In 1901, the newly independent Cuban Republic drafted a constitution that explicitly gave citizens the right to “express their thoughts freely” without “prior censorship.” This principle served as the basis for the country’s constitution of 1940, which reaffirmed the right of every person “to express his thoughts freely in words, writing, or any other graphic or oral means of expression.”

Despite these constitutional guarantees of free speech, successive dictatorships throughout the first half of the twentieth century gradually eroded civil liberties and fueled civil discontent. For example, Geraldo Machado’s government “reforms” in 1928 restricted the civil rights granted by the constitution of 1901. A military coup led by Fulgencio Batista in 1952 imposed statutes that severely limited freedom of speech. Batista’s censorship practices also included manipulation—newspaper editors were bribed to curtail reports of anti-government guerrillas. By the time that Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army toppled Batista in 1959, many Cubans had grown weary of foreign intervention and domestic government corruption. Many welcomed Castro, who had publicly declared the revolution’s “absolute and reverent respect” for the 1940 constitution.

Despite these and other emancipatory declarations, however, one of the new revolutionary government’s first steps was to shut down or take over all independent newspapers and magazines. Censorship then became less a matter of legal reform than one of monopolization; the state became the sole owner of all major forms of communication—from television stations to publishing houses to film companies. Many Cuban writers and artists had supported the revolution and had looked forward to creative freedom; however, it soon became evident that art was to serve ideology. Castro’s famous 1961 speech, “Words to the Intellectuals,” set the tone for the new society: “What are the rights of the revolutionary or nonrevolutionary writers and artists? Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, no right.” The socialist constitution of 1976 allowed freedom of expression that was “in keeping with the objectives of socialist society.” The penal code prescribed up to fifteen years in prison for anyone who incited revolts against “the socialist state by means of oral, written or any other kind of propaganda.”

As a result of these laws, many Cuban artists have been harassed, fired, exiled, or imprisoned for expressing views deemed “counterrevolutionary.” Some writers, such as Armando Valladares, Angel Cuadra, and Jorge Valls, managed to smuggle manuscripts out of prison while serving long sentences. Valladares was a Cuban poet and dissident who spent twenty-two years in Castro’s prisons after refusing to display a pro-Communist sign at his workplace. While imprisoned, he wrote poems documenting torture, starvation, and human rights abuses, smuggling them out on tissue paper. His memoir, Contra toda esperanza (Against All Hope, 1985), is considered one of the most powerful literary testimonies of Cuban political repression. Cuadra was a lawyer, poet, and political prisoner for over fifteen years, jailed for conspiring against the Cuban government, and Valls was known for his prison memoir Twenty Years and Forty Days: Life in a Cuban Prison (1986). Others, such as Heberto Padilla, were forced to make public retractions for writing “enemy propaganda,” in what became known as the “Padilla affair.”

The nationalization of the communications media in Cuba provided the state with its most powerful ideological tool, binding individual expression to the country’s vast political machinery.

By the 1980s and 1990s, as the Cold War came to a close and the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cuban state’s control over media became even more important to regime survival. The economic crisis of the so-called Special Period, which began in 1991, forced the regime to manage increasing social discontent without relaxing its grip on information. In a time of scarcity and growing public frustration, state-controlled media became a tool for national resilience and ideological continuity, portraying the crisis as another chapter in Cuba’s heroic resistance.

This rigid control ensured that alternative narratives were largely exiled from public discourse, and were only accessible through secret publishing efforts, underground networks, or foreign broadcasts like Radio Martí. While some artists and intellectuals began to cautiously test the limits of expression during this time, often using metaphor, irony, or allegory to critique the system, their work remained vulnerable to repression.

Thus, by the end of the twentieth century, Cuba’s nationalized media had not only silenced many individual voices but also fundamentally redefined the relationship between the citizen and the state, subordinating personal expression to a collective revolutionary identity—one that the government alone had the authority to define and enforce.

In the twenty-first century, the Cuban government continued to censor books, newspapers, radio, television, film, and music, and has also placed restrictions on internet use. To use anything other than basic email, through a government-provided client, requires a special permit, which few people (mostly government officials) are granted; it is also nearly four times more expensive. Freedom House estimates that by 2020, 18 percent of Cuban households had a computer and 33 percent had household internet access. There is also a black-market trade in accounts that have internet permissions. In the 2010s, most internet content was not censored, since so few Cubans could get online, but content directly related to Cuban politics, such as the blogs and websites of dissidents, were often blocked. Members of the public were not permitted to buy computers until 2007, and mobile phones were banned until 2008. A Cuban Twitter-like service called ZunZuneo was created in 2010, funded by the US government, which hoped to foment unrest in the country. The service reached over 40,000 Cuban users, but was shut down in 2012 when the government funding ran out, as it was not financially sustainable on its own. In 2014, Cuba’s first independent digital newspaper, 14ymedio, was founded; it, and other independent publications, are accessed via an illicit network known as SNET.

In the mid-2020s, the Cuban government is taking a more active role in internet censorship and control. The government actively blocks websites run by independent journalists, exiled media, and human rights organizations. The government has responded to unrest—most notably during the July 11, 2021, protests—by cutting off mobile data or throttling services like WhatsApp, Facebook, and Telegram to prevent organizing and information sharing.

The Cuban government also passed Decree-Law 370 (2019) and Decree-Law 35 (2021) that criminalize online content deemed subversive, false, or contrary to public morals. Decree-Law 370 targets individuals who post dissenting views on social media, allowing fines and confiscation of devices, while Decree-Law 35 expands state control over telecommunications, penalizing content labeled as “fake news” or a threat to public order. These laws give the government broad authority to monitor, censor, and punish digital expression. Human rights organizations have condemned both measures as tools for silencing criticism and restricting freedom of speech online.

Bibliography

Alberto, Arce, et al. “US Secretly Created ‘Cuban Twitter’ to Stir Unrest.” Associated Press, 4 Apr. 2014, apnews.com/article/technology-cuba-united-states-government-904a9a6a1bcd46cebfc14bea2ee30fdf. Accessed 11 May 2026.

Brown, Jeffrey. “Will Better Relations with the US Mean an Easing of Censorship in Cuba?” PBS NewsHour, 17 June 2015, www.pbs.org/newshour/show/will-better-relations-u-s-mean-lessening-censorship-cuba. Accessed 11 May 2026.

“Cuba: Freedom on the Net 2024 Country Report.” Freedom House, 2024, freedomhouse.org/country/cuba/freedom-net/2024. Accessed 11 May 2026.

“Cuba.” Reporters without Borders, 2026, rsf.org/en/country/cuba. Accessed 11 May 2026.

“Cuba: Telecommunications Decree Curtails Free Speech.” Human Rights Watch, 25 Aug. 2021, www.hrw.org/news/2021/08/25/cuba-telecommunications-decree-curtails-free-speech. Accessed 11 May 2026.

“Freedom in the World 2015: Discarding Democracy: Return to the Iron Fist.” Freedom House, 2015, freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/01152015_FIW_2015_final.pdf. Accessed 11 May 2026.

Henken, Ted A., et al., editors. Latin America in Focus: Cuba. ABC-CLIO, 2013.

Markowitz, Eric. “Cuba’s Internet: Censorship and High Costs Mean Web Access Will Remain Elusive for Most Cubans.” International Business Times, 23 Sept. 2015, www.ibtimes.com/cubas-internet-censorship-high-costs-mean-web-access-will-remain-elusive-most-cubans-2106830. Accessed 11 May 2026.

Rojas, Rafael. “Censorship in Cuba.” Artists at Risk Connection, 11 July 2023, artistsatriskconnection.org/country-profile/censorship-in-cuba/. Accessed 11 May 2026.

“When Will Cuba Improve Relations with Its Own Journalists?” Reporters Without Borders, 20 Jan. 2016, rsf.org/en/when-will-cuba-improve-relations-its-own-journalists. Accessed 11 May 2026.