Cuba: 150 km from Florida, 10,000 km to the Internet — Where Geopolitics Decides Your Ping

Cuba sits 150 km from Florida — closer than most Caribbean islands to the US mainland. Dozens of submarine cables crisscross the Caribbean Sea, connecting virtually every island nation to Miami's NAP of the Americas, the most important internet exchange point in Latin America. Every island except one. For 11 million Cubans, the internet takes a 10,000 km detour through Venezuela and Brazil — because of a six-decade embargo that has shaped not just trade and diplomacy, but the very physics of how data moves. We monitor Cuba's only civilian submarine cable every 12 hours. Here is what we see.

Four Cables, One Internet

Cuba has four submarine cables landing on its shores. But 11 million Cubans can only use one of them.

Read the table again. American cables land on Cuban soil, connecting to Miami — the very hub Cuba is forbidden from using. The fiber is lit. The bits flow. But they serve US military personnel at Guantánamo Bay, not Cuban citizens 50 km away.

This is not a technical limitation. It is a political one. The same photons that carry American internet through Cuban waters cannot, by law, carry Cuban internet to American shores.

The Geography

Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean — 1,250 km long, positioned like a cork in the bottle of the Gulf of Mexico. It controls three of the most important maritime passages in the Western Hemisphere: the Strait of Florida, the Yucatán Channel, and the Windward Passage. For centuries, this made Cuba strategically vital — from the Spanish colonial era through the Cold War, whoever controlled Cuba controlled access to the Gulf.

This geographic centrality should make Cuba a natural hub for submarine cables. The island sits at the physical crossroads of Caribbean connectivity. Cables like ARCOS-1, Americas-II, and the Bahamas Internet Cable all pass within sight of Cuban waters. The cable map of the Caribbean is dense with lines that arc around Cuba, connect through Cuba's straits, and land on every neighboring island.

But none of them connect to Cuba. On the submarine cable map, Cuba is a black hole at the center of one of the world's most connected seas. Geographic centrality, it turns out, is meaningless when geopolitics overrides physics.

Before ALBA-1: The Satellite Era

Until January 2013, Cuba's entire international internet went through geostationary satellites. Imagine the constraints: a satellite orbiting at 36,000 km altitude, meaning every single request — loading a webpage, sending an email — traveled 72,000 km round-trip before even reaching a server. The result was latency above 600 ms, and total bandwidth of roughly 323 Mbps for the entire country of 11 million people.

To put that in perspective: 323 Mbps is less than what a single household fiber connection delivers in most developed countries today. Cuba shared that bandwidth among government offices, universities, tourist hotels, and the handful of authorized users. Regular Cubans simply did not have internet access.

Internet cafés, where they existed, charged $4.50 per hour. The average Cuban salary was $20 per month. One hour of painfully slow satellite internet cost almost a full day's wages. Access was not just expensive — it was restricted. Regular Cubans could not legally access the internet from home until 2008, and even then only for email. Real home broadband did not arrive until 2023, via ETECSA mobile data plans.

The satellite era lasted far longer than it should have. The cable that would change everything was actually laid in 2011 — but it sat dormant at the bottom of the Caribbean for nearly two years before anyone turned it on.

ALBA-1: The Cable That Changed Everything (and Nothing)

The story of ALBA-1 is as much political as it is technical. The cable was funded by Hugo Chávez's Venezuela as part of the ALBA initiative — the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, a political bloc designed to counter US influence in Latin America. The name is not subtle. ALBA means "dawn" in Spanish, and the alliance was Chávez's vision of a new ideological order in the hemisphere.

The cable was built by Alcatel-Lucent's Chinese subsidiary, stretching 1,552 km from La Guaira, Venezuela, to Santiago de Cuba on the island's southeastern coast. It was physically laid between 2010 and 2011, with a theoretical capacity of 5.12 Tbps — representing a 15,000-fold improvement over Cuba's satellite bandwidth.

Then nothing happened. The cable sat dormant for nearly two years. The Cuban government said nothing. No official activation date was announced. Analysts speculated about technical issues, political disagreements, or deliberate delays. It was Doug Madory, an internet routing researcher, who first detected the activation in January 2013 by observing changes in Cuba's BGP routing tables. The cable had been quietly turned on.

But 5.12 Tbps of capacity did not translate into 5.12 Tbps of internet for Cubans. ETECSA, Cuba's state telecom monopoly, controls every byte that enters or leaves the island. The cable's capacity was — and remains — deliberately throttled. One cable, one company, zero redundancy, and total government control over what flows through it.

Our monitoring tells an interesting story: we ping ALBA-1 every 12 hours, and the La Guaira to Santiago de Cuba segment shows a baseline latency of approximately 160 ms with remarkable stability — the ratio of measured RTT to baseline never exceeds 1.05. The cable itself is perfectly healthy. The bottleneck is not under the sea. It is on shore.

Our Measurements: The 10,000 km Detour

From our RIPE Atlas probes across Eurasia, every single packet destined for Cuba takes the same extraordinary detour. No matter where you start, the path avoids the United States entirely:

The key insight: traffic always goes through Brazil — through São Paulo or Brasília — before reaching Cuba. Never through the United States. Not once, in any of our measurements, from any probe location. Cuba is the only Caribbean country where this happens.

Consider the absurdity. A packet from Jerusalem to Cuba travels west across the Mediterranean, through transatlantic cables to Europe, then south across the Atlantic to Brazil, north through Brazilian backbone networks to Venezuela, and finally through ALBA-1 to Santiago de Cuba. Roughly 10,000 km of cable to reach a destination that is, in a straight line, perhaps 10,000 km away — but in the wrong direction.

Now compare this with Cuba's neighbors. Jamaica, sitting 150 km south of Cuba, routes through Miami in under 100 ms. The Dominican Republic connects via multiple cables to Florida. Even Haiti — the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere — has direct US cable connections. Cuba, at the geographic center of the Caribbean cable network, is the one country excluded from it.

The Guantánamo Paradox

The US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay occupies 120 square kilometers on Cuba's southeastern coast. It has been there since 1903, maintained under a perpetual lease that Cuba's government considers illegal but cannot terminate. And it has its own fiber-optic submarine cables.

GTMO-1, activated in 2016, connects Guantánamo Bay directly to Dania Beach, Florida, delivering 128 ms round-trip latency to the US mainland. GTMO-PR, activated in 2019, connects the base to Punta Salinas, Puerto Rico, at just 22 ms. These are modern, high-capacity fiber-optic cables carrying fast, reliable American internet.

These cables carry American internet through Cuban territorial waters, landing on Cuban soil. The bandwidth is excellent. The latency is low. The connection to Miami — the Caribbean's premier internet hub — is direct and reliable. And not a single byte is available to the 11 million people on the other side of the perimeter fence.

Two internets coexist on the same island. Inside the base: American broadband, Netflix, video calls home. Outside: a 10,000 km detour through Venezuela, government-controlled access, and prices that consume a significant fraction of monthly income. This is perhaps the most vivid physical illustration of what the embargo means for Cuba's digital life. The cable is right there. The internet is right there. But it might as well be on the moon.

ETECSA: The State Monopoly

ETECSA — Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A. — controls everything. All ISP services, all mobile connectivity, all fixed-line telecom, all international bandwidth. Every single byte that enters or leaves Cuba passes through ETECSA's infrastructure. There is no second carrier, no private ISP, no competitive alternative.

The internet reached regular Cubans in slow, deliberate stages:

2008 — Cubans allowed to purchase mobile phones and access email-only accounts.
2013 — ETECSA opens public Wi-Fi hotspots in parks and plazas. Price: $2 per hour. Cubans gathered in clusters around hotspots, hunched over phones, buying scratch-off access cards.
2015 — Wi-Fi hotspot prices reduced. Still expensive relative to wages.
2018 — Mobile data launched on 3G networks. The first time most Cubans could access the internet from anywhere, not just a Wi-Fi hotspot.
2023 — Home broadband arrives via ETECSA's Nauta Hogar service. Limited availability, limited speeds.

Even today, internet prices remain high relative to the average Cuban salary of $30–50 per month. A basic mobile data plan consumes a significant portion of monthly income. This economic barrier functions as a second layer of access control, on top of the technical limitations.

The scarcity gave rise to a uniquely Cuban innovation: the "paquete semanal" — the weekly package. Every week, someone downloads a massive collection of content — movies, TV shows, music, apps, news articles, even classified ads — onto a 1 TB hard drive. That drive is copied and distributed hand-to-hand across the island, from Havana to the smallest towns. It is, in effect, a parallel offline internet, updated weekly, consumed by millions. In a country where streaming is impractical and bandwidth is precious, the paquete became Cuba's real content delivery network — powered not by fiber optics but by sneakernet.

What Changes Next?

Cuba's connectivity future depends on several factors, most of them political rather than technical:

ARIMAO cable (2023) — A new cable was announced with a landing station in Cienfuegos, on Cuba's southern coast. It could potentially connect to Mexico, Colombia, or other Caribbean destinations. But its current status is unclear. Our monitoring shows no response from ARIMAO endpoints, and no public traffic has been detected routing through it. Whether it is still under construction, dormant like ALBA-1 was, or abandoned — nobody outside ETECSA seems to know.

ARCOS-1 extension — In 2018, a request was filed with the US Federal Communications Commission to extend the ARCOS-1 cable to Cuba. ARCOS-1 is a major Caribbean ring cable that connects 15 countries and territories to the US. Adding Cuba would have been technically straightforward — the cable already passes near Cuban waters. The FCC denied the request. The embargo prevailed over engineering.

Domestic fiber backbone — ETECSA is building a domestic fiber-optic backbone connecting Cuban cities, but progress is slow and details are scarce. Even if domestic infrastructure improves, the international bottleneck remains: one cable to Venezuela.

Starlink and LEO satellites — SpaceX's Starlink has transformed connectivity for remote and underserved areas worldwide. But it is not available in Cuba due to US sanctions. The technology exists, the satellites are overhead, but the same embargo that blocks submarine cables also blocks signals from space.

The geopolitical calculus — Any new submarine cable connecting Cuba to the broader internet requires either a change in US policy (allowing cable landing rights or transit through US-connected systems) or the development of non-US alternatives. The latter is what Cuba has pursued with ALBA-1 and potentially ARIMAO — building connections that bypass the US entirely. But this limits Cuba to partners willing to invest in infrastructure that serves a small, economically constrained market under international sanctions.

What Our Data Shows

We monitor Cuba's submarine cables continuously, collecting latency measurements every 12 hours from probes distributed across multiple continents. The data tells a clear and consistent story.

ALBA-1 is stable and healthy. The cable's latency is consistent, its performance ratio barely fluctuates, and it shows no signs of degradation. The problem was never the cable. The cable works exactly as it should.

The problem is that 11 million people — living at the geographic center of the Caribbean's submarine cable network, 150 km from the world's most important Latin American internet exchange — are excluded from that network. Not by physics, not by engineering, not by economics, but by politics.

Every Caribbean island around Cuba connects to Miami in under 100 ms. Cuba connects to the world through a 10,000 km detour via Brazil and Venezuela, at 250–300 ms, through a single cable funded by an ideological alliance. American fiber-optic cables land on Cuban soil and carry American internet past 11 million people who cannot use it.

Cuba proves, more vividly than perhaps any other country on Earth, that submarine cables are not just infrastructure. They are geopolitical instruments. The map of Cuba's cables is not a network diagram. It is a political document.

Try It Yourself

Check the current latency to Cuba's landing stations using our real-time monitoring tools:

ALBA-1 cable monitor — La Guaira, Venezuela → Santiago de Cuba

GTMO-1 cable monitor — Dania Beach, Florida → Guantánamo Bay

GTMO-PR cable monitor — Guantánamo Bay → Punta Salinas, Puerto Rico

Route calculator: Jerusalem → Siboney

Route calculator: Miami → Havana

Cuba country dashboard — all cables, all measurements, updated every 12 hours

Data: GeoCables monitoring network, RIPE Atlas probes. Measurements updated every 12 hours. Last verified April 2026.