Cloudflare WARP is described in a lot of places as “a free VPN”. That description is convenient, it is the one that gets shared most, and it is the one that can land someone in serious trouble if they take it literally. It is worth understanding what it actually is, because for a Cuban it does have a real use, just not the one usually advertised.
What Cloudflare says it does
The company itself has never promised anonymity, nor hiding you, nor unblocking content. What it offers is transit security: encrypting the journey between your device and the internet so that the networks in between, the hotel wifi or your local provider, cannot read what passes through.
That is genuinely useful. But it is a different problem from the one faced by someone who wants to publish a complaint from the island.
What technically happens to your IP address
When you turn WARP on, your real IP address is replaced with a Cloudflare address. And here is the detail almost nobody mentions: that address is deliberately chosen to represent your approximate location. WARP is not designed to make you look like you are in another country. On the contrary, it tries to keep you looking like you are where you are.
That is why it does not do what many people want from a commercial VPN: bypassing country restrictions on a video service, say, or appearing to hold a different nationality.
So why does it work in Cuba?
Because a Cuban runs into two different barriers, and only one of them can cost them their freedom. The first, and the serious one, is ETECSA, which blocks so that you cannot read. The second is that some United States services refuse, of their own accord, connections arriving from Cuba, so as not to breach sanctions or out of fear of breaching them. A team from the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech measured it from inside the island and published it at USENIX Security: 546 domains out of 10,093 tested. That is not “half the internet,” but it gets in your way daily.
That refusal is applied by looking at the source IP address and checking it against lists of ranges allocated to Cuba. And there is the key: when WARP is active, the connection no longer arrives with an ETECSA address but with a Cloudflare one. Even if it geographically represents a nearby area, it is not a Cuban IP, and therefore it is not on those lists.
That is why it works, and I know from people who use it on the island that this is precisely what they use it for: getting into pages that shut the door on them for being Cuban.
The honest way to put it
WARP does not protect you from the Cuban state, which is the one that can put you in prison. It is good for the other thing: getting back into places that shut the door on you for having a Cuban IP address. Two problems of very different size, and confusing them is what proves expensive.
And it is worth saying where each one comes from. Cuba is under sanctions because of what its government does, not because of what Cubans do. A company being over-cautious and shutting the door on a customer in Havana is an irritating side effect. ETECSA cutting you off so that you cannot read, and the Penal Code jailing you for what you write, is the substance. Ordinary Cubans end up paying for both, and both have the same origin.
What WARP does not do
- It does not make you anonymous. Cloudflare sits in the path by design. You change who can see your traffic, you do not remove everyone from the equation.
- It does not change the country you appear to be in, as we have just seen.
- It is of no use if your phone is searched. No network tool protects what is stored on the device, and Decree-Law 370 expressly provides for confiscating it.
- It does not protect you from the person you are talking to. The documented convictions for posts and messages did not come from traffic interception but from informants and from content in plain sight. I wrote about that in another article.
One more warning, contextual rather than technical: in Cuba, according to Freedom House, ETECSA goes as far as filtering the word “VPN” itself. Using circumvention tools is not a neutral gesture in a country whose Penal Code punishes what you publish.
If what you want is an actual VPN, with its free plan and its small print, I compared six of them by Cuban criteria.
Conclusion
WARP is the right tool for a specific problem: regaining access to sites that shut the door on you for having a Cuban IP. For that it is free, it is simple, and it works.
For publishing a complaint without being identified, it is not the tool. And saying so plainly strikes me as more useful than adding one more article to the many that present it as a privacy VPN, because whoever reads it from the island is risking a great deal more than I am in writing it.