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On July 10, 2026, the National Assembly of People’s Power published the Draft Law on the Personal Identity and Address System and set up an email address to collect public feedback. Twenty days later, on July 30, the bill was passed during an ordinary session. Replacing the framework established by Decree-Law 248 of 2007, the new law is framed as a routine update to the national identification system. In practice, however, it vastly expands the volume and sensitivity of the data the Cuban state can consolidate on every individual, placing much of its management and control directly in the hands of the Ministry of the Interior (MININT).
This is no isolated development. It takes place in a country with a well-documented track record of digital surveillance, arbitrary detentions, and the harassment of journalists and activists—and where the state has repeatedly turned to Russia, and China before it, for the technology and expertise needed to bolster its apparatus of control. Furthermore, it arrives as Cuba endures one of the most severe electrical crises in its recent history, marked by rolling blackouts that exceed 20 hours a day in some regions.
At the same time, the state media portrayed the process as part of “legislative business as usual.” The bill appeared alongside the Labor Code and bills on housing, land, and the reorganization of the central administration, while the Attorney General’s Office and other official accounts used hashtags such as #CubaLegisla (Cuba Enacts Legislation) and #PoderPopular (people’s power) to publicize parliamentary meetings, consultations, and debates. In this narrative, the emphasis was on the legislative process and the modernization of the system, rather than on the scope of the data that would fall under state control.
The body transformed into data, under the control of the MININT
The law significantly expands the catalog of biometric information linked to citizen identity. Joining the photographs and fingerprints already stored in the Cuban system, the new framework explicitly adds facial features, voice, iris patterns, handwritten signatures, skin tone, eye color, and height.
This is a critical distinction. Features like a person’s face, voice, or iris do not function like a password that can be reset following a breach; they are permanent identifiers. Combined, they enable individuals to be recognized passively, without their active participation or consent.
Every Cuban citizen and foreign resident will also be assigned a unique, permanent, and non-transferable identity number designed to identify them across public registries. That number can serve as a link between information that was previously scattered across different systems: birth, address, physical characteristics, and digital identity.
Added to this is the Certified Digital Identity, an electronic representation of a person’s physical identity used for authentication and to carry out procedures on digital platforms. The system will be organized around a “Single Digital Identity Provider” and will operate under the authority of the MININT, directly linking each citizen’s physical identity to their interactions with the government’s digital services.
The fundamental issue is not merely the volume of data collected, but who controls the system. MININT’s Directorate of Identification, Migration, Foreign Nationals, and Citizenship leads and oversees the new framework. The Ministry will administer the central registry, oversee digital identity certification, request information from public and private entities, and impose administrative penalties. Any legal appeals against decisions made by the authority must first pass through MININT’s own administrative chain of command before reaching the courts.
Opacity by Design
The system lacks any independent external authority capable of auditing operations, investigating potential abuses, or holding the MININT accountable. This absence of oversight is particularly alarming given that the original bill set no clear boundaries against the remote cross-referencing of facial or voice data with other databases, nor did it explicitly ban mass biometric recognition.
The law also tightens state control over physical residence. Cuban citizens residing in the country and permanent foreign residents are required to register a single official address and keep it continuously updated. Property owners, building managers, and landlords now face legal obligations to report individuals moving into or out of specific properties. The framework incorporates sanctions for non-compliance and broadens the grounds under which authorities can confiscate an individual’s physical identity card—including whenever a person is taken into police custody or brought to a police station.
International standards governing biometric systems explicitly demand safeguards against such invasive capabilities: necessity, proportionality, security, transparency, and independent oversight. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has repeatedly warned of these technologies’ potential to expand unchecked state surveillance. In Cuba, however, these powers are concentrated within an agency that sits at the very core of the state’s security and surveillance apparatus.
Normalizing Surveillance as Routine Administration
The official messaging surrounding the law illustrates how it was presented to the public. Following its release on July 10, the draft bill circulated on state-run channels—such as the National Assembly’s Telegram account— primarily as a routine item on the legislative calendar, rather than a sweeping overhaul of the country’s biometric infrastructure.
Under hashtags like #CubaLegisla (Cuba Enacts Legislation) and #PoderPopular (people’s power), the National Assembly promoted the bill alongside unrelated legislation governing housing, land, labor, and public administration reform.
Tras el correspondiente proceso legislativo, los diputados aprobaron la ley «Del Sistema de Identidad Personal y Domicilio»#PoderPopular #CubaLegisla pic.twitter.com/4qBZAWCniI
— Asamblea Nacional Cuba (@AsambleaCuba) July 30, 2026
This framing was mirrored across state media outlets, including the Cuban News Agency (Agencia Cubana de Noticias). The newspaper Juventud Rebelde presented the bill’s publication as a platform to foster “citizen participation” and cultivate the population’s “legal literacy.” Granma initially grouped the measure within a broader package of legal updates; when the law passed on July 30, the outlet dedicated a standalone report emphasizing system modernization, physical and digital identity integration, and the security benefits of a centralized registry. While official coverage elaborated on these administrative goals, it omitted details regarding the specific types of personal data to be integrated into the system.
Uncovering those specifics required reviewing the full text of the draft bill published by the Assembly itself. In Chapter VI, which covers the Personal Identity and Address Registry, Article 61 lists the specific data points subject to registration: face and facial features, fingerprints, handwritten signature, voice, iris, skin tone, eye color, and height. The registry itself is placed under the national jurisdiction of MININT’s Directorate of Identification, Migration, Foreign Nationals, and Citizenship.
Biometrics, therefore, is not hidden in the legal text. The difference lies in how the reform was communicated: while the provisions of the law make it possible to assess the volume and sensitivity of the information that will be centralized in a single state system, the institutional narrative surrounding its discussion and approval focused on modernization, security, digital identity, and citizen participation. What was publicly presented as an update to the identification system also involves bringing together, under a single infrastructure, permanent physical data capable of identifying each individual, both inside and outside Cuba.
The Russian Precedent: From DATYS to the Moscow Metro
None of this infrastructure is being built from scratch. For years, Cuba has been expanding its surveillance capabilities with technological support from Russia and China. China has been a key partner in telecommunications and digital infrastructure, while Cuba’s regulatory framework has tightened in parallel. Decree-Law 35 of 2021, for example, expanded the state’s powers over telecommunications and cybersecurity under the guise of security, internal order, and national defense.
Cooperation with Russia has extended directly into physical surveillance. In May 2025, Diario de Cuba reported on Miguel Díaz-Canel’s visit to the St. Petersburg Monitoring Center, where he toured the city’s municipal video surveillance facilities. Months later, the Cuban Ministry of Communications and St. Petersburg municipal authorities signed an agreement to adapt Russian surveillance models for the “Digital Varadero” initiative—a project aimed at developing the resort town under a “safe city” framework.
To this is added DATYS, a technology company linked to the MININT and specializing in identification, biometrics, and security. In June 2025, it signed a cooperation agreement with the Russian company NtechLab, the developer of FindFace, a facial recognition technology used by Moscow authorities to identify individuals through their video surveillance system, as documented in a Reuters investigation. In 2023, the European Union imposed sanctions on NtechLab for its involvement in technologies used in the context of serious human rights violations.
This connection is particularly relevant now: as Cuba establishes the legal framework to centralize facial images, voice recordings, iris scans, addresses, and digital identities, it is deepening its cooperation with entities that have already developed technologies capable of turning that data into large-scale identification tools.
Surveillance Amid the Blackouts
The law also comes at a critical time for Cuba’s electrical and technological infrastructure. Throughout 2026, the National Electric System has experienced further total blackouts amid a crisis that has been ongoing since 2024 and has left large areas of the country subject to prolonged daily power outages.
In July, power outages lasted more than 20 hours in various regions, and some areas went nearly an entire day without power. The problem stems from an obsolete system, characterized by a combination of fuel shortages, deteriorating infrastructure, and recurring breakdowns in an aging and poorly maintained thermoelectric power plant fleet, with generation shortfalls that have exceeded 2,000 megawatts.
This is the backdrop against which Cuba is expanding its advanced biometric identification system: a law that requires residents to keep their address information up to date, allows for penalties for noncompliance, and establishes a framework for centralizing citizen data and digital identity.
While the regime struggles to ensure a steady supply of electricity for much of the day, it is simultaneously moving toward one of the most extensive and sophisticated centralized biometric identification systems in its history.
