Cuba’s dictatorship has kept student movements under its thumb for decades. But the regime’s repressive tactics have inadvertently breathed new life into a new generation of student activists. These young people are willing to fight for the island’s freedom.
June 2025
When Cuba’s state telecommunications company, ETECSA, announced sweeping changes to internet pricing on May 30, few could have predicted that the decision would awaken a sleeping giant. Intense frustration over surging data costs quickly evolved into something far more significant — the first genuine student movement in Cuba since Fidel Castro took power in 1959. For the first time in more than six decades, Cuban university students are reclaiming their voice, challenging not just internet prices but also the fundamental structures of state control that have defined their reality since birth.
The immediate spark was the stark inequality of the new internet-pricing scheme: While it offered a basic monthly plan of six gigabytes of data for 360 Cuban pesos (roughly US$1), every additional three gigabytes would cost 3,360 pesos, more than the country’s monthly minimum wage of 2,100 pesos. Moreover, these additional top-ups would have to be purchased in U.S. dollars only, which most Cubans do not have. Previously, one gigabyte of mobile data cost around 125 pesos; thus the new rate represented a nearly tenfold increase. For a generation that has relied on the internet for education, communication with family abroad, and connection to the wider world, this represented more than economic hardship; it constituted what students termed “digital apartheid.”
Their response was swift and unprecedented. By early June, students from the University of Havana’s Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science called for an academic strike. Peers from other faculties, including philosophy, sociology, and arts and letters, soon joined the effort. What distinguished this movement from isolated protests of the past — including those of 2021 and 2024 over medicine, food, and power shortages — was how the students pressed their grievances and demands. They issued formal statements addressed to university authorities, held a peaceful academic strike, organized interfaculty coordination meetings, circulated open letters rejecting the new internet-pricing scheme, and published statements defending academic freedom. Through it all, the students maintained nonviolent discipline even as university administrators, backed by state-security agents, threatened them with potential consequences, including expulsion from the university, if they continued the strike and refused to reaffirm their unconditional support for the Communist Party.
The strikes quickly spread beyond Havana to other universities across the island, in Santiago de Cuba, Bayamo, Holguín, and Santa Clara. The students issued statements on economic injustice as well as fundamental rights, access to information, equality, and the right to organize independently from the state. When, on June 3, ETECSA offered students a modest concession of an additional six gigabytes, they rejected the gesture, deeming it insufficient. As Andrea Curbelo, a 20-year-old University of Havana art history student, told Reuters: “All Cubans should have the same opportunity as we students to communicate with their families . . . they should restructure the measure so that everyone has the same rights.”
Generations Silenced
To understand the historical magnitude of this moment, one must appreciate how thoroughly the Cuban state dismantled student autonomy after 1959. In the first half of the twentieth century, Cuban universities were vibrant hubs of political activism and intellectual ferment. Students led anticorruption protests, demanded democratic reforms, and played decisive roles in national politics. The University of Havana’s famous Escalinata (staircase) was the site of countless demonstrations that ultimately shaped the country’s trajectory.
After 1959, Castro’s communist regime systematically took control of the country’s student organizations, transforming them into “transmission belts,” to use a Communist Party term — that is, a vehicle for inculcating state ideology and exercising control. As a result, universities lost their traditional autonomy and became instruments of revolutionary indoctrination rather than centers of critical inquiry. And the Federation of University Students (FEU), once a bastion of student independence, became an appendage of the Party, which selected FEU leaders for their political reliability, not their dedication to representing student interests.
The Castro regime understood that autonomous student movements pose an existential threat to authoritarian control. By coopting student structures and filling them with ideological commissars, the state ensured that universities would produce compliant professionals rather than critical citizens. For the last 66 years, Cuban students have been forced to chant revolutionary slogans while remaining silent about their own aspirations and grievances.
The movement now underway represents a fundamental rupture with this imposed passivity. For the first time since 1959, Cuban students are acting not as grateful recipients of revolutionary education, but as young citizens with legitimate demands and the courage to articulate them publicly. They are reclaiming the autonomous space that was stolen from their predecessors and asserting their right to think, speak, and organize independently.
State Monopoly and the Price of Control
The internet-pricing controversy illuminates a broader pattern of state monopoly that extends far beyond telecommunications. ETECSA’s ability to impose such a dramatic price increase reflects the unchecked power of state monopolies in a system that tolerates no competition or accountability. In any normal economy, such price hikes would be constrained by competitive alternatives or regulatory oversight. In Cuba, however, citizens are subject to the arbitrary decisions of state enterprises without any recourse save silent submission.
This monopolistic structure serves the regime in multiple ways. Economically, it extracts maximum revenue from a captive population, particularly targeting the Cuban diaspora that sends remittances to family members on the island. Politically, it maintains control over information flows by making internet access a privilege rather than a right. Socially, it reinforces inequality (necessary for maintaining control) by ensuring that only those with access to foreign currency can afford meaningful connectivity.
The student protests against the internet price increase challenge the underlying logic of state monopoly itself. When students demand equal access for all Cubans, they are implicitly questioning why essential services should be controlled by unaccountable state enterprises rather than competitive markets or democratic institutions. When they organize strikes despite official warnings, they are asserting that citizens have rights that transcend the state’s claimed authority to regulate every aspect of social life.
The Digital Divide and Political Awakening
The internet represents something profound for this generation of Cuban students: their first sustained contact with a world beyond state control. Unlike their grandparents and parents, who lived through the hardships of the revolution’s early years and the “special period in peacetime” after Soviet troops left the island in 1991, today’s young people have experienced the gradual opening of digital spaces that the state cannot fully monitor or manipulate. They have seen how their peers in other countries live, study, and express themselves freely. They understand that their isolation is artificial, maintained by deliberate policy rather than natural circumstances.
The regime’s attempt to restrict internet access through pricing represents a desperate effort to maintain information control in an increasingly interconnected world. But this strategy reveals the fundamental contradiction of authoritarian modernization: Economic development requires connectivity and education, yet connectivity and education inevitably erode the popular ignorance on which authoritarianism depends.
The student protests thus represent more than resistance to high prices; they constitute a claim to full citizens’ rights in the digital age. They are demanding not just affordable internet access but also the right to participate as equals in the global community of learning and exchange. In doing so, they are articulating a vision of Cuba’s future that transcends the revolutionary mythology and totalitarian control that have defined the island for generations.
The government’s response to the protests reveals the profound contradictions inherent in modern authoritarianism. On one hand, the regime desperately needs educated, technically skilled citizens to maintain economic competitiveness and social stability. Universities must produce engineers, doctors, and professionals capable of functioning in an increasingly complex world. On the other hand, education inevitably cultivates critical thinking, exposure to alternative ideas, and expectations of dignity and respect that conflict with authoritarian control.
This contradiction was apparent in the regime’s initial confused reaction to the strikes. University administrators simultaneously acknowledged students’ “legitimate concerns” while warning against disruptions to academic activities. The national president of the FEU, José Almeida, found himself in the impossible position of respecting student grievances while opposing the strikes themselves. Meanwhile, the government tested its familiar strategy of blaming external forces for internal discontent, with officials suggesting that the protests were “externally provoked” — a claim that rang hollow when students themselves expressed their grievances with such clarity and conviction.
Perhaps most tellingly, as students were protesting internet pricing, the Union of Young Communists chose to honor the Special Forces of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, the regime’s elite repressive units commonly known as the “black wasps.” This symbolic gesture sent an unmistakable message: Amid student demands for greater freedom, the state was preparing to deploy force to maintain control. The timing was no accident; it represented a calculated effort to intimidate young people contemplating resistance.
Choreographed Submission
Three weeks after Cuban students first called for strikes against internet price hikes, the regime orchestrated a carefully staged dialogue designed to give the appearance of responsiveness while ensuring capitulation. The process unfolded with methodical precision. University administrators quietly identified student leaders and issued private warnings about academic consequences. Families of prominent protesters received visits from state-security agents, ostensibly to discuss the importance of their children’s futures. The message was unmistakable: Continued resistance would carry costs not just for the students themselves, but also for their families.
Simultaneously, authorities handpicked a group of “representative” students for what the regime termed a “constructive dialogue” with ETECSA officials. These carefully selected participants were guided toward predetermined conclusions about the company’s “difficult economic circumstances” and the “necessity” of the price increases. The resulting student statement, released with great fanfare, expressed understanding for ETECSA’s position and gratitude for the modest additional data package offered specifically to university students.
The statement bore all the hallmarks of official manipulation. Its language echoed government talking points about external pressures and economic realities. It spoke for the entire student body while having been crafted by a handful of individuals whose selection process had been opaque. The spontaneous voice that emerged in early June demanding equality, questioning state monopolies, and challenging systemic inequalities had been replaced by the familiar cadences of official discourse.
This manufactured resolution served multiple purposes for the regime. It provided a face-saving exit from a potentially destabilizing confrontation while demonstrating to other potential dissidents the futility of sustained resistance. The “dialogue” became a template for managing future unrest: Isolate genuine leaders, coopt moderates, and present orchestrated compliance as authentic reconciliation. The regime’s intimidation tactics, deployed with surgical precision against families and their futures rather than through mass imprisonment, ultimately worked to quell the protests, which have since subsided.
The academic strike had a slogan of sorts: “Behind the fear lies the country we dream of.” This sentiment, which students shared and was amplified via social media, remains a powerful undercurrent in the resistance to the Cuban regime. Fear may have returned for now, but the dream articulated during those extraordinary weeks in June will not be erased. For three weeks, Cuban students acted as citizens rather than subjects, demanding accountability from state institutions and asserting their right to equal treatment. The regime’s manipulative response, no matter how effective in the short term, cannot displace that memory, nor can it break the networks formed during the protests or quell the students’ awakened political consciousness.
Carolina Barrero is a Cuban historian, writer, and human-rights advocate who emerged as a leading voice during the 2021 civic uprising in Cuba. She is the founder of Ciudadanía y Libertad, an independent organization dedicated to the promotion of civil and political rights.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images
|
FURTHER READING |
||
Is Central America Doomed? |
Can Cuba Change? Ferment in Civil SocietyCarl Gershman and Orlando Gutierrez The opposition within Cuba has become more diverse as well as more unified, and the regime, despite its enduring capacity for repression, is showing signs of underlying weakness. |
The Return of Politics in BangladeshThe student movement that toppled Bangladesh’s longtime autocratic ruler wants more than a return to the old order. These young revolutionaries are seizing a chance to start anew. How and by whom will the country’s future be decided? |