Hello,
We published a new research report on the blocking of independent media in Cuba amid the constitutional referendum last Sunday: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/cuba-referendum/
Some key findings include:
* Independent media Tremenda Nota (which covers women's rights, LGBTQI and other human rights issues in Cuba) was blocked on the eve of the referendum
* We observe that many other independent media websites (which have been pushing for a "no" vote) were blocked leading up to and during the referendum as well
* Cuba's only ISP (ETECSA) has changed its censorship techniques: they have switched from serving blank block pages to now implementing IP-based blocking, thus censoring access to websites that support HTTPS as well
* ETECSA continues though to serve blank block pages for sites that have not added HTTPS support
* Some media sites may have previously been blocked by Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology, but they are now IP-blocked
* Some media sites were temporarily unblocked in January 2019 (and the means of blocking changed thereafter), suggesting that ETECSA may have made changes to its censorship equipment around that time
In the report, we share a graph (based on openly available OONI data) which shows how the blocking of media changed in Cuba over the last ~2 years.
It seems that the OONI website (ooni.io) is now blocked in Cuba as well, but ooni.torproject.org remains accessible.
We thank OONI Probe users in Cuba who made this study possible!
All the best,
OONI team.