Several independent Cuba-based digital media outlets offer alternative voices to censored state-run television, radio, and newspapers.
These outlets may be used as platforms to critique the Socialist government, or to discuss issues or offer entertainment that the state-run media may ignore or consider taboo, such as sports and fashion.
Since 2014, the government has opened approximately 830 paid public Wi-Fi hotspots which cost $1 per hour to use or on fixed fee per Mb.
[9] Experts estimate that a small percentage of Cubans periodically have access to the internet via government institutions, foreign embassies, expensive connections in some hotels, and black market sales of minutes by those permitted to have online accounts.
[10] As a result, relatively few Cubans on the island are able to read independent digital content online, but email use via mobile phone is becoming more common (see below).
According to Fulton Armstrong, who was the U.S.' most senior intelligence analyst for Latin America from 2000 to 2004, many independent Cuban media outlets are indirectly funded by the U.S., which spends $20 million each year on "democracy promotion" in Cuba.
The one-terabyte collection of digital content includes television shows, films, smartphone applications, music files, and PDFs, most of which have been downloaded off the island, often illegally.
A small group of writers and editors works from their central offices in Valencia but staff is also radicated on the island, Madrid, Barcelona, Miami, Mexico, Argentina, etc.
[citation needed] The second most visited Cuban independent digital news site is Periódico Cubano, founded in January 2017 in the United States.
Such complaints led the Cuban Government to include it in 2019 in its list of digital sites blocked within the Island, a situation that the media itself denounced in July of the same year,[20] coinciding, and not coincidentally, with the publication in the Official Gazette of ten measures that limited freedom of expression, including the controversial Decree-Law 370, which clearly established as a violation the act of "disseminating, through public data transmission networks, information contrary to social interest.
It was founded in 2017[22] with the aim of showing Cuba's diversity and serves as a portal and platform for video documentaries work on LGBT issues, human rights, economy, race, and entrepreneurship.
[28] In the words of Baruch College academic Ted Henken, "the project was intended to be an alternative to the official media while avoiding falling into the twin traps of implacable criticism or uncritical praise.
[30] El Estornudo (in English: "the sneeze") is an online magazine of literary journalism and has a similar style to the U.S.'s Vanity Fair.
The webzine was founded by Abraham Jiménez Enoa, a University of Havana journalism graduate who had previously been a freelance journalist, in March 2016.
According to the committee to Protect Journalists, Jiménez Enoa puts each issue together with the help of a group of literary-minded friends who write for free, and uploads stories and photos from public Wi-Fi access points.
[32] In addition to independent news outlets that have emerged in recent years, publications from the Catholic Church in Cuba also offer an alternative to the official state mass media.
[33] In addition to covering various religious, social, cultural, political and economic aspects of Cuban life, the publication provides a space for discussion of topics including sovereignty, monetary reform, the functioning of the National Assembly, and the controversial debate on loyal opposition to the Cuban government.
[34] Similarly, the church publication Palabra Nueva was founded in April 1992 and currently has a monthly circulation of 12,000 copies, which are distributed in parishes and chapels of the Archdiocese of Havana.
In recent years, in addition to its religious and pastoral content, Palabra Nueva has published articles and analysis on economic and social reality of the country and the reform process initiated under President Raúl Castro.