Making the Internet Work: Case Study in a Socialist, Low-Income Country Under US Sanctions

This paper presents an ethnographic study of how Cuban citizens navigate and adapt to the country’s shifting digital landscape under economic precarity, international sanctions, and pervasive state surveillance. We frame these experiences through the lens of counter-appropriation, a concept that foregrounds how users creatively repurpose technologies in constrained environments. Drawing on fieldwork conducted across three phases (2017, 2019, and 2024), we trace the evolution of internet access in Cuba — from public Wi-Fi hotspots and restrictive access cards to widespread mobile data usage — and how users have responded through situated practices of counter-appropriation. While state surveillance and infrastructural limitations remain constant features of digital life in Cuba, our findings reveal a growing repertoire of workaround strategies that include peer-to-peer content sharing, Telegram bots, VPNs, unregistered SIM cards, and informal economic networks. These practices are embedded in broader negotiations of power, trust, and economic survival. By centering counter-appropriation, we conceptualize it as a situated socio-technical practice through which users repurpose technologies to meet everyday needs and to subtly resist and reshape the boundaries of control. Our contribution to CSCW lies in extending understandings of how digital infrastructures are used and navigated in politically and economically constrained settings, and in highlighting how collaborative, semi-visible forms of digital resilience constitute ongoing negotiations with power. By situating Cuba’s evolving use of connected technologies within broader global dynamics of control and appropriation, we offer a perspective on connectivity that foregrounds improvisation, inequality, and collective adaptation.