By Raúl Antonio Capote on April 24, 2026
image: AI generated
The cognitive war against Cuba is taking on unprecedented dimensions; through manipulations to sow doubt and make people distrust official institutions and media is among the fundamental objectives.
A quantitative analysis of more than 3,000 news items in the last week of March, conducted by the Observatory of Unconventional Warfare on the Razones de Cuba website, reveals that the narrative is centered on a compact bloc of media outlets based in Western centers of power, particularly in the U.S.
The list is headed by Bloomberg.com, with 1,427 reports; this outlet, aligned with the agenda set by Washington, is followed by a network of websites that act as echo chambers for counterrevolutionary rhetoric.
However, what is most significant is not the volume, but the segmentation: the cognitive warfare machine has divided its attacks into four strategic vectors.
The first, framed within the economic war (42%), involves spreading news that exaggerates the crisis, hides achievements, and presents any adjustment measure as proof of collapse.
This is followed by siege diplomacy (28%), which translates into attempts to undermine Cuba’s strategic relations—such as its ties with Mexico—and delegitimize the country’s sovereign legislative activity.
The issue of human rights (18%) is a staple on the agenda, including biased reports on judicial proceedings that can serve to justify foreign interference, followed, in order of priority, by migration (12%), the promotion of the “brain drain,” and the manipulation of the diaspora as a political weapon.
The precision of this segmentation reflects what journalist and researcher Rosa Miriam Elizalde has defined as “a brutal information war in digital media,” in which there is a cluster of more than 100 sites bearing Cuba’s name but produced from Miami or Spain.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this war, which has intensified in recent weeks, is the use of algorithms as multipliers of destabilization.
What every Cuban sees in their social media feed is the end product of an engineering process designed to prioritize conflict. Companies like Meta, X, and Alphabet not only track what is posted; they are on the hunt for subconscious behavior: the time in milliseconds that the gaze lingers on a video, click patterns, approximate location, and networks of frequent contacts.
Applied neuroscience has shown that outrage, fear, uncertainty, and sadness generate stronger dopamine responses than joy. Thus, in the Cuban context, any legitimate frustration—caused by the blockade—is detected by the machine and immediately fed back and amplified.
In this way, the Cuban population is micro-segmented into thousands of psycho-graphic groups. This is not traditional propaganda; it is precision social engineering. A recent example is the nationwide power outage that occurred on Monday, March 16, which became the perfect trigger for the disinformation machine.
As Cubadebate has documented, based on a blurry, unverified photo, an attempt was made to spread the lie that explosions had occurred and military helicopters were flying over Havana. Within hours, ambiguous content was amplified by accounts and media outlets, transforming through repetition into a narrative of alarmism and crisis.
Plato’s myth of the cave takes on a tragic dimension today: the manipulators want Cubans to keep staring at the shadows they project onto the wall—shadows of violence, chaos, and despair.
Source: Cuba en Resumen