Almost everything written about censorship in Cuba ends badly. This article does not.
When the regime blocked WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram and Signal after July 11, 2021, the idea was simple: cut the channels carrying images of the protests out of the country. And it failed. Around a million and a half Cubans got out anyway.
The numbers
The Canadian company Psiphon recorded 1,389,000 users connecting from Cuba through its network on the Thursday after the protests, and 1,238,000 by midday on Friday. That figure of roughly 1.4 million is close to 20% of all Cuban internet users.
And they moved real data: more than 600 terabytes since the Sunday of the protests.
One in five Cubans with internet access installed and used a circumvention tool within days. This was not a group of seasoned activists. It was ordinary people who wanted to see and to tell what was happening.
How it works, for anyone who wants to understand it
Psiphon is not a miracle product: it is a managed network of intermediary servers combined with several tunneling protocols at once, among them VPN, SSH and HTTP proxy. The client dynamically picks a way out depending on what works at that moment.
The technically interesting part is the other one: traffic obfuscation. The system is designed so that its connections are hard to identify, imitating common types of web traffic or simply looking like random bytes moving across the network.
And there is the crux. Blocking is applied to something recognizable: a domain, an IP address, a protocol signature. If the censor cannot tell your traffic apart from everything else, they cannot block it without blocking everything. That is why Psiphon survives both DNS manipulation and deep packet inspection.
It has existed since 2007, it was developed by Canadian university researchers, the company is based in Toronto and it receives United States government funding. That last fact is public and worth stating, because the regime uses it as an argument. And one thing does not change: whoever installed it in those days did not do it out of geopolitics, they did it to be able to send a video.
What this proves, and what it does not
It proves that platform blocking is a low barrier. A million and a half people cleared it in days, without technical training, in a country with expensive and slow internet. When people have a good enough reason, they find a way.
But do not draw the wrong conclusion, and here I come back to the same point. Psiphon solves the problem of access: it gives you back the connection to what was cut off. It does not solve the problem of exposure: it does not erase what you published under your own name, it does not protect your phone if it is confiscated, and it does not stop someone in your group from informing on you.
Regaining access and being safe are not the same thing. Confusing them is exactly the mistake that can cost years in prison, as I described in the first article of this series.
That said, the figure remains the best news in this series. In July 2021 the Cuban state decided that eleven million people should not be able to tell what they were seeing. A million and a half told it no.