Some "Intractable" Properties of Cyberspace in the Face of Censorship

In his classic text "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", Langdon Winner describes two ways in which technologies can embody values, interests, and political decisions. One of them concerns artifacts or technological processes that are "inherently political," that is, those which appear to require—or manifest themselves as narrowly compatible with—specific political relationships. They contain encoded within themselves a set of "intractable" properties that we cannot manage or reorient toward a different political worldview.

Cyberspace—which I understand as the environment constituted by activities and social relations that develop on and through the Internet—is a clear example of Winner's theory. In my doctoral research, I examined this problem in the realm of international relations. From this perspective, when a state connects to the Internet, it must accept that alongside the many benefits it offers for information flow and economic activity, it—the State—will face tremendous difficulty in filtering or controlling what enters and exits, in exercising sovereignty over that infrastructure and the social relations it supports.

My object of study, as you have seen, is Cuba. I am entirely opposed to privacy violations and information censorship. Yet I also do not believe that the theory of the "free marketplace of ideas" is viable without a strong component of critical thought materialized across global citizenry—one that enables people to discern and verify every proposition. Nevertheless, for years, Cuban authorities have understood that when faced with the exploitation of ICTs for political subversion by the United States, censorship is the only option available. From a certain perspective, it remains a plausible choice.

In my thesis, I demonstrate how unsustainable this framework has become, especially given the current state of cyberspace development. Actors implementing projects—funded by U.S. taxpayers—to change the political regime on the Island adapt strategically to the socio-technical conditions of possibility that cyberspace offers. Simultaneously, certain efforts prove remarkably effective at proactively circumventing the security measures Cuba deploys.

The first point is evident in how historical ICT-based subversion services have migrated toward digital social networks. Consider what is now known as Martí Noticias. This effort began in 1983 as Radio Martí and was immediately and efficiently blocked by Cuban technicians—and remains so today. In 1990, the strategy escalated with TV Martí, with even more adverse results. You could say it was never truly seen in Cuba. But blocking a radio or television signal is one thing; blocking content transmitted on YouTube or Facebook is entirely another.

The implementation of HTTPS at the application layer of the Internet works against surveillance and censorship practices. (The bad news for those betting on these techniques is the ongoing adoption of new communication standards, such as Encrypted Client Hello.) For example, Martí Noticias now replicates articles from its web portal on X. Since traffic between the user's browser and X is encrypted, a network administrator must rely on a highly robust and privacy-invasive system to determine that a user has accessed Martí Noticias content on X.

HTTPS also underlies more specific actions that enable web content blocking evasion. In Cuba, when a user attempts to access the official domain "martinoticias.com" without activating a VPN, the Cuban Internet provider blocks the request. Yet today, access to Martí Noticias from Cuba is possible through an Amazon Web Services solution that routes traffic to CloudFront distributions whose Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs) rotate periodically. On October 10, 2025, the active FQDN was "dygu7utqcrabl.cloudfront.net." On May 30, 2026, it was "d42r92lxbqnun.cloudfront.net."

Furthermore, by late May 2026, I verified that Bifrost technology—operated by the Qurium Media Foundation—enables access to blocked websites such as those associated with Cubanet and El Estornudo, both historical recipients of funding from the NED, the State's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and the defunct USAID. The solution functions by automating the creation of live replicas of their websites hosted on Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services—systems "too costly for repressive regimes to block."

Indeed, blocking traffic to Qurium's contracted servers is complex because it requires attacking entire domains that host other relevant and legitimate services on the Internet. Cubanet's web address on Amazon's Content Delivery Network is "https://s3.eucentral-1.amazonaws.com/qurium/cubanet.org/index.html." Due to HTTPS characteristics, basic web traffic monitoring tools only reveal access to the subdomain "s3.eucentral-1.amazonaws.com," leaving authorities with only the problematic option of blocking it entirely.

elTOQUE presents a special case in evasion practices. Because the media possesses its own computer development team—staffed by competent professionals graduated from Cuban higher education institutions—they can design custom solutions, such as redirects through domain names contracted directly by the organization. I verified these practices using WHOIS lookups and reverse IP searches. For instance, after access to "eltoque.com" was temporarily blocked in December 2025, they registered "eltoque.online" as an alternative access point through Cloudflare servers. Later, when Cuban authorities blocked an online survey they promoted in April 2026, they routed access through a new domain—"yijaa.site"—registered two months before.

Finally, Cuba's DNS-based and blacklist-based blocking systems lack comprehensiveness and consistency. In some cases, network administrators block only the exact domain of a website, like "eltoque.com," leaving access open to reporting or services hosted on subdomains such as "hoteles.eltoque.com" or "arte.eltoque.com." This happens at my university.

What emerges from this empirical analysis is a fundamental asymmetry. Cyberspace, as an infrastructure and as a domain of social relations, possesses genuinely intractable properties—Winner's word is precise. Its decentralized architecture, in conjunction with evolving technical standards, the ambiguous state of international law regarding these issues, the attention economy, and cognitive biases—all of these create conditions that subversive actors can exploit strategically while adapting proactively to countermeasures. For Cuba, it is a complicated game: the architecture itself tilts overwhelmingly in favor of those who attack.

Source for the image generated with GPT technology.