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Authoritarian regimes in Latin America, such as those in Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and El Salvador, censor and persecute those who report on their abuses. In this context, social networks have become a vital space for freedom of expression and civil society organization.
ProBox analyzed the digital conversation in Cuba for 18 months, between January 2023 and July 2024, and its results are compiled in the report “Cuba: Propaganda as a historical weapon against the present decadence”, which is now available for download in this article (see below).
The main findings of the research reveal two important points:
- Venezuelan influence: from Cuba, narratives favorable to Nicolás Maduro’s regime and Venezuelan officialdom are amplified.
- Citizen resistance: Cubans use social networks such as Facebook to denounce the crisis and organize protests, defying the regime’s censorship.
Despite the loss of access to the Twitter API (now X) in March 2023, ProBox continued to monitor the conversation in Cuba, concluding that the Cuban citizenry continues to resist Cuban government propaganda seeking to silence dissident voices.
5 relevant keys that you will find in the report
- 66.85% of the socio-political messages positioned in Cuba on X during 2023 belong to Venezuela.
- Ephemeris are the main narrative driven by the Cuban state in networks, with 101 trends and almost 3 million messages in 2023 and 38 trends with almost 800 thousand messages between January and July 2024.
- ProBox was dedicated to the analysis of the most recurrent topics in the citizen narratives and of which the Cuban regime did not talk about, such as: the fuel crisis, increase in femicides, banking and shortage of banknotes, collapse of the educational system, medicines and food online, traffic accidents, protests and repression, among others.
- The protest continues: in the first seven months of 2024 at least 26 trends positioned in X in Cuba are of citizen protest, totaling around 37,947 messages.
- Of the 41 Venezuelan trends that were positioned in Cuba between January and July 2024, 14 are related to the July 28 presidential elections, occupying the first place as the most repeated narrative.
Cuba: an induced and irreversible crisis
What to do about the Cuban situation is one of the questions that researchers, academics, journalists and members of civil society have been asking themselves for a long time. The answers open the debate to an in-depth study of the crisis, its evolution and the way to act in the face of what is happening.
The debate generated during the “DDC Forum: For the Cuba of tomorrow”, held as part of the Latin American Conference of Investigative Journalism (COLPIN) and as part of the activities for the 15th anniversary of Diario de Cuba, corroborate the findings found by ProBox in its recent report on this country.
In principle, the transition to democracy seems complex at this time. The current situation on the island “will make the transition to democracy more costly… The country is off, and not only electrically, but also in a general sense. The crisis taking place today in Cuba is of a political nature, induced and irreversible, and this obliges us to inform and try to find solutions”, warned Pablo Díaz, director of Diario de Cuba.
However, Arístides Vara Horna, from the CubaData statistical project, pointed out that in the face of adversity, resilience is one of the characteristics present in Cuba.
“Cubans have learned to adapt to circumstances. Cuban political perception has changed and distrust in the government has grown steadily,” he points out. In addition, the CubaData representative emphasized that “people, despite fear, have found ways to protest and participate.”
A relationship to disinform
In her participation in the Latin American Conference of Investigative Journalism, the executive director of ProBox, Mariví Marín, raised the link that exists between authoritarian regimes to disinform.
“We have documented the coordination between the communication strategies of the regimes of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua with specific patterns such as censorship in traditional and web media, persecution of journalists, activists and civil society, creation of legal frameworks to regulate the internet and manipulation of the conversation in social networks,” said Marín.
However, the ProBox Executive Director expanded beyond Latin America. Authoritarian regimes are being trained by Russia, Iran and China in a much larger global disinformation scheme.
For ProBox, the only way to prevent authoritarian communicational cooperation from continuing to expand to more digital spaces is based on strengthening the links between the content moderators of the platforms and independent civil society representatives, as well as supporting the efforts of civil society, journalists and researchers to document and make visible the censorship and manipulation of information in Cuba. Documenting these phenomena is fundamental, as they not only affect thousands of Cubans, but also threaten democracy worldwide.
