Cuban dictatorship’s internet price gouging leads to nationwide Cuban student strike
800% price hike on internet access by Havana limits Cubans access to information.
On May 30, 2025 Etecsa, Cuba’s state telecommunications company,announced changes in internet pricing, and new restrictions in what critics describe as a “covert dollarization” and a “cash grab” by limiting recharges in Cuban pesos (CUP) to a maximum of 360 within a 30-day period for 6 GigaBytes, but permitting an unlimited number of recharges in foreign currency, such as US dollars.
The new prices far exceed the minimum wage in Cuba, and dramatically restricts access to the internet for most Cubans, who are poor. Press reports indicate it is a 800% price hike.
Over 70 percent of Cubans were able to access the internet on the island, but with the price hikes the number may drop, and the amount of time Cubans can be online will decline. Internet access in Cuba is of significant importance for basic communication across the island, with family abroad and for higher education.
It is also used as an avenue for activism, but Havana’s penal code also presents severe punishments for engaging in online activism.
Cubans are fed up with a two tiered system. Regime elites sit on billions of dollars in cash and assets living the high life in Cuba and abroad.
New luxury hotels, with their own generators, are built by the Cuban military conglomerate GAESA while the dictatorship pleads poverty, and blames the United States.
Cubans have been growing increasingly frustrated, and since the July 2021 national protests discontent has continued to multiply, and Havana has not offered improvements or shared elite wealth.
The price hike on internet access is causing Cuban students to challenge what they consider a fundamental injustice imposed by Cuban officials using nonviolent means.
They are withdrawing their obedience by not going to class. They are engaging in a student strike, which is a method of social noncooperation.
The Albert Einstein Institution, founded by nonviolence scholar Gene Sharp, offers a definition of nonviolent action relevant to the current circumstance on the island.
“Nonviolent action is a technique of sociopolitical action for applying power in a conflict without the use of physical violence. Nonviolent action may involve acts of omission (e.g., people refusing to perform acts they usually perform, are expected by custom to perform, or are required by law or regulation to perform), acts of commission (e.g., people performing acts that they do not usually perform, are not expected by custom to perform, or are forbidden to perform), or a combination of the two.”
This approach is also generating international support from the Cuban diaspora, academia, and students of other nationalities in other countries. This nonviolent strategy has a greater probability of achieving a positive outcome than violence.
Violence, even when successful in defeating the immediate adversary, does not automatically translate to democratic change. The 1953 Moncada Barracks Assault, and the promises of the Castros did not result in a democratic renaissance, but a more terrible, violent, and totalitarian dictatorship that ended a corrupt authoritarian dictatorship in power for less than seven years, replacing it with one in power for 66 years, which continues to repress and murder Cubans.
For decades, grassroots groups in Cuba struggled for liberty, organizing Cubans to defend their human rights and freedoms. The nationwide protests on July 11, 2021 across the island were historic, but they did not arise out of nowhere.
The decision to adopt nonviolence strategy is not unique to Cuba, but rather part of a global trend of rising nonviolent resistance to injustice. Nor are the efforts of tyrants to lure their enemies to embrace violence unique to the Castro regime.
University academics and nonviolent theoreticians Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth in their 2008 study “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict” compared the outcomes of 323 nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006. The two authors found that major nonviolent campaigns achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with just under half that at 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns.
Even the 26% figure needs to be looked at within the Cuban context. The above-cited Stephan, Chenoweth study also suggests “that nonviolent campaigns are more likely than violent campaigns to succeed in the face of brutal repression.” Below is a presentation by Erica Chenoweth made at Ted Talks Boulder published in 2013.
The events surrounding the Cuban opposition initiative, the Varela Project, highlighted in the National Democratic Institute 2002 documentary “Dissident: Oswaldo Payá and the Varela Project” that is available to view below demonstrates the power of nonviolence to challenge even the most entrenched dictatorship.
Now Cuban students are in the midst of making history in Cuba. Let us hope that they maintain nonviolent discipline, and achieve their stated goal.
Originally published as a CubaBrief by the Center for a Free Cuba on June 9, 2025.