Havana/Two days after the two main telecommunications routes that link the Isle of Youth with the rest of Cuba were damaged, the special municipality remains practically incommunicado. Mobile phones remain without service and working landlines only allow local calls, while the state telecommunications monopoly, Etecsahas not yet explained what happened or when it expects to fully restore the connection.
Uncertainty even reaches those who call the company directly in search of information. This newspaper contacted the Etecsa customer service this Thursday to ask when communications with the Isle of Youth would be restored. “We don’t have a date yet, stay connected through official channels,” an operator responded.
The breakdown turns the territory into an island within another island, this time also digitally. Its inhabitants can communicate with each other through landlines that continue to operate, but cannot call the rest of the country. They also do not have mobile phones and internet access has been interrupted.
The disconnection also came after local authorities boasted of a modest expansion of internet access. The Citizen Portal of the Isle of Youth celebrated the installation of a new Wi-Fi zone in Nueva Gerona, in a park next to the 41st Street roundabout, as a way to “increase internet connectivity options for Pineros.” Shortly after, the breakdown left the entire territory without mobile service.
The company limited itself to specifying that they are “maritime links” and that its specialists work together with Geocuba employees to repair them in “complex conditions.”
Etecsa reported this Tuesday that “the two main connection routes” of the special municipality with the national network had suffered damage. The company limited itself to specifying that they are “maritime links” and that its specialists work together with Geocuba employees to repair them in “complex conditions.” The state monopoly claimed to have enabled alternative connections to keep local authorities in communication, but did not announce any similar solution for the population.
The situation has also provoked criticism on social networks. “If there is an impact and the problem is even greater, what are the alternatives for this type of problem? Well, there aren’t any, it’s that simple, because they only base telecommunications on a single type of infrastructure,” wrote on Facebook Arian Cáceres, who demanded that the population be authorized to use other forms of access to communications. “That is an alternative,” he added.
A good part of the complaints that multiply on social networks come from Cubans residing abroad or outside the Isle of Youth and who, from one moment to the next, lost communication with their relatives. They are the ones who ask most insistently when calls and internet access will return, given the impossibility of even knowing how their relatives are.
The isolation is even more paradoxical because the rest of Cuba does not exactly enjoy good communications either. Electricity outages have turned into internet and telephone outages in numerous territories. Etecsa has recognized that electrical failures and difficulties with the generator sets that support its facilities are causing increasing damage to the mobile network.
In 2008, Etecsa linked the Isla de la Juventud with the national network through an underwater fiber optic cable.
The current disconnection also contrasts with what happened exactly 18 years ago. In 2008, Etecsa linked the Isla de la Juventud with the national network through an underwater fiber optic cable. The infrastructure came into operation practically on the brink of Hurricane Gustav, which hit the territory on August 30 of that year with category 4 and winds exceeding 200 kilometers per hour.
Gustav devastated the Island. He knocked down poles, communication towers, homes and electrical networks, and left a devastation that the authorities themselves compared at the time to a nuclear explosion. However, the new fiber made it possible to maintain the link with the rest of the country in the midst of the disaster. The official press celebrated success with an unequivocal “Communication never failed.”
Now there was no need for a Gustav. Without a cyclone over the Gulf of Batabanó or a comparable meteorological phenomenon, the two main sea lanes have been damaged. The company has not explained how it happened, whether both failures have the same origin or what kind of redundancy exists between the connections.
Both episodes leave a disturbing photograph of the vulnerability of infrastructures that should be strategic
The fragility of communications adds to another recent blow against an essential infrastructure of the special municipality. Last week it was learned that unknown all the equipment had been stolen of the seismological station of the Isla de la Juventud, inaugurated in 2024 and linked to the earthquake and tsunami monitoring system of Cuba and the Caribbean.
The thieves took the solar panels, batteries, seismometer, digitizer and the rest of the equipment. “They left nothing,” lamented Enrique Arango Arias, head of the National Seismological Service, who even asked that the incident not be considered a simple theft but rather sabotage due to the consequences for a warning system of national importance.
So far there is no element that links that looting with the current telecommunications breakdown. Both episodes, however, leave a disturbing photograph of the vulnerability of infrastructures that should be strategic.
Eighteen years after the official press celebrated that not even Gustav had managed to cut off communications, the Isle of Youth once again discovers the literal dimension of its double insularity.
