Route Analysis

Cuba: The Only Country Where Geopolitics Decides Your Internet Route — 276ms via Brazil Because the US Is Off Limits

Published: March 17, 2026

Cuba sits 150 kilometers from Florida — close enough to see the lights of Key West on a clear night. Dozens of submarine cables crisscross the waters between the United States and the Caribbean, connecting virtually every island nation to the global internet. Every island except one.

Our measurements tell an extraordinary story. Over 111 traceroutes from probes in Tbilisi and Jerusalem, every single packet destined for Cuba follows the same pattern: it crosses the Atlantic to Brazil, never touching the United States. Not once. Not a single measurement out of 111 shows US transit. In a region where American internet infrastructure dominates every routing table, Cuba is a blank spot — a country whose internet geography is shaped not by physics or economics, but by six decades of geopolitics.

The Route: Tbilisi to Havana via São Paulo

Here is the hop-by-hop path from our Tbilisi probe to Cuba:

Hop	Location	Operator	RTT
1–6	Tbilisi, Georgia	JSC Global Erty	26ms
7	Sofia, Bulgaria	Level 3	25ms
8	São Paulo, Brazil	Level 3	237ms
9	São Paulo, Brazil	Level 3	257ms
10	Brasília, Brazil	BR.Digital Telecom	374ms

The packet flies from Sofia to São Paulo in a single hop — 25ms to 237ms, a 212ms jump that represents the transatlantic crossing via submarine cable directly to Brazil, bypassing North America entirely. From São Paulo, it continues to Brasília, where BR.Digital Telecom (AS61889) serves as the gateway to Cuban networks.

From our Jerusalem probe, the path is slightly different but follows the same logic: Israel → Germany → Brazil. Cellcom (the Israeli carrier) hands off to an unnamed transit provider in Germany, which routes directly to BR.Digital Telecom in Brazil. Average RTT: 266ms — actually faster than Tbilisi's 276ms, likely because the Israel-to-Europe leg is shorter.

Why Not Through Miami?

Miami is the natural internet hub for the entire Caribbean. It is home to the NAP of the Americas — one of the largest internet exchange points in the Western Hemisphere. Virtually every Caribbean nation connects through Miami: Jamaica, Trinidad, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Haiti. The cables are literally in the water, passing within kilometers of Cuban shores.

But US law prohibits it. The American embargo against Cuba, in effect since 1962, extends to telecommunications infrastructure. US companies cannot build cables to Cuba, cannot provide transit to Cuban networks, and cannot allow Cuban traffic on their infrastructure. This prohibition has survived the end of the Cold War, survived diplomatic openings under Obama, and remains in full force today.

The result: Cuba is 150 km from the world's largest Caribbean internet hub and cannot use it. Instead, its traffic must cross the Atlantic to reach Brazil — a distance of roughly 10,000 km — before accessing the global internet. It is as if you lived next door to a highway on-ramp but were forced to drive 100 km to the next one because of a property dispute.

ALBA-1: The Cable Built by Geopolitics

Cuba's only commercial submarine cable is ALBA-1 — a name that stands for Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America). The cable was funded by the Venezuelan government under Hugo Chávez, built by Alcatel-Lucent's Chinese subsidiary, and connects Siboney, Cuba to La Guaira, Venezuela, with a branch to Jamaica.

The cable's history reads like a spy novel. It was laid in 2010–2011 at a cost of $70 million. Then it sat dormant for nearly two years. Nobody knew why. In January 2013, internet routing analyst Doug Madory detected that the cable had been quietly activated — Cuba's state newspaper Granma confirmed two days later.

Before ALBA-1, Cuba's entire internet depended on geostationary satellite links. The bandwidth was expensive, the latency was brutal (600ms+ round trip to satellite orbit and back), and the capacity was limited to about 323 Mbps for the entire country. ALBA-1's design capacity of 5.12 Tbps represented a theoretical 15,000x increase — though actual utilization has been limited by Cuba's internal infrastructure and deliberate government throttling.

ALBA-1 is operated by Telecomunicaciones Gran Caribe (TGC), a joint venture that is 60% owned by state-run Telecom Venezuela and 40% by Cuba's Transbit. The cable connects to the wider internet through Venezuela and Jamaica, which in turn connect to Brazilian and European transit networks — explaining why our traceroutes show the Brazil path.

Cuba's Complete Cable Map

Our submarine cable database shows five cables with landing points in Cuba, but the reality is more nuanced:

Cable	Landing Point	Status	Purpose
ALBA-1	Siboney, Santiago de Cuba	Active	Only commercial international cable
ALBA-1	Santiago de Cuba	Active	Second landing of same cable
ARIMAO	Cienfuegos	Planned/New	Connection to Mexico/Colombia
GTMO-1	Guantanamo Bay	Active	US military base only
GTMO-PR	Guantanamo Bay	Active	US military base only

The irony is striking. Two of Cuba's five cable landings serve the US Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay — American military infrastructure on Cuban soil, connected to the global internet via cables that Cuba cannot use. GTMO-1 connects the base to Florida, and GTMO-PR connects it to Puerto Rico. These cables operate under the US Department of Defense's DISN (Defense Information Systems Network) and are completely separate from Cuba's civilian internet.

So Cuba has American submarine cables on its territory — cables that connect to Miami, to the NAP of the Americas, to the very infrastructure Cuba is forbidden from using. The cables are there. The fiber is lit. But the bits flowing through them serve American military personnel, not Cuban citizens.

The BR.Digital Question

Every measurement in our dataset terminates at BR.Digital Telecom (AS61889) in Brasília, Brazil — not at ETECSA (Cuba's state telecom) in Havana. This means one of two things: either the Cuban target IP is anycast/hosted in Brazil, or BR.Digital is the last visible hop before traffic enters the Cuban network through ALBA-1 via Venezuela.

The most likely explanation is the latter. Cuba's international traffic flows through ALBA-1 to Venezuela, then to Brazilian transit networks. BR.Digital Telecom appears as the last hop because the Cuban domestic network does not respond to traceroute probes — either by design (security policy) or because ETECSA's infrastructure simply does not generate ICMP responses.

This opacity is itself significant. Cuba is one of the most opaque internet destinations in our entire database. Most countries show at least some internal hops — ISPs, exchange points, last-mile providers. Cuba shows nothing after Brazil. The packet enters a black box and emerges at the destination.

Four Probes, One Answer

The consistency of our data is remarkable:

Source	Measurements	Avg RTT	Path
Tbilisi	99	276ms	GE → BG → BR
Jerusalem	12	266ms	IL → DE → BR

Every measurement from every probe takes the same basic route: cross the Atlantic to Brazil, enter the Cuban network from the south. No variation. No alternative paths. No US transit.

Compare this to any other Caribbean destination. Jamaica, 150 km from Cuba, routes through Miami in under 100ms from the US East Coast. The Dominican Republic connects via multiple cables to Florida and Puerto Rico. Even Haiti, one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere, has submarine cable connections to the United States.

Cuba's 276ms from the Caucasus and 266ms from the Middle East are not bad by global standards — they are comparable to many Pacific island nations. But for a country 150 km from Florida, they represent an extraordinary geographic tax imposed not by distance but by diplomacy.

What Could Change

Two developments could transform Cuba's connectivity. The ARCOS-1 cable system filed with the US FCC in 2018 for permission to build a branch to Cuba, landing at Cojimar near Havana. ARCOS-1 already connects 24 points across the Caribbean and Latin America — adding Cuba would be a short, inexpensive extension. But the US Department of Justice recommended denying the request, and the extension has not been activated.

The ARIMAO cable, landing at Cienfuegos, represents a potential new route to Mexico and Colombia that would diversify Cuba's connectivity beyond the Venezuelan dependency. But details on its operational status remain scarce.

Until one of these materializes, Cuba remains the only country in the Caribbean — and one of the very few in the world — where the path your data takes is determined not by where the cables are, but by which side of a 60-year-old political divide you are on.

Data based on 111 traceroute measurements from GeoCables probes in Tbilisi (Georgia) and Jerusalem (Israel), collected between February and March 2026, using RIPE Atlas infrastructure.