Ninety-four percent of respondents say they are deeply dissatisfied with Cuba's political system. Ninety-nine percent want the single-party structure abolished. These are not figures from a dissident pamphlet - they emerge from a structured, multi-outlet civic survey conducted by more than 20 independent Cuban media organizations, including CiberCuba and elTOQUE, running from April 23 through May 1 on the platform encuestascuba.net. The numbers are striking not because they are surprising, but because of the scale and coordination required to produce them under active state suppression.
What the Survey Reveals - and What It Cannot
The questionnaire spans 32 questions across seven thematic sections, covering politics, the economy, exile, and potential transition scenarios. Within 48 hours of launch, nearly 22,000 responses had been recorded: 12,711 from within Cuba and 9,191 from the diaspora. The Cuban regime blocked access to the survey URL from the first day, compelling participants on the island to use VPNs to reach it - a technical barrier that filtered the respondent pool before a single question was answered.
José Jasán Nieves, director of elTOQUE, is candid about the methodological constraints. The survey overrepresents Havana, skews toward university-educated respondents, and is structurally limited to Cubans with internet access - a group that, while growing, remains a minority in a country where connectivity is both expensive and intermittent. These are not trivial caveats. Any honest reading of the data must hold them in view.
Yet Nieves draws a meaningful distinction: this is not presented as a statistically representative sample of the Cuban population in the classical sense. It is, in his framing, "a civic exercise to gather opinions in the most structured way possible from Cubans both inside and outside of Cuba, and compare them." The volume of participation, achieved despite active state interference, is itself part of the message.
The Numbers That Carry Political Weight
Beyond the headline figures on system rejection, several data points carry particular analytical weight. Miguel Díaz-Canel received an average rating of 1.11 out of five, with 93.7% of respondents awarding him the lowest possible score. A total of 75.1% expressed support for transitioning to a liberal democracy with a market economy. And only 5.3% identified the United States embargo as the country's primary problem - compared to 82.5% who cited the absence of civil and political liberties.
That last contrast is especially significant. For decades, the Cuban government has built much of its domestic and international legitimacy around the embargo narrative: that the island's dysfunction is an externally imposed condition rather than a product of the system itself. The survey data, however unrepresentative in statistical terms, suggests that among connected, educated Cubans - precisely the demographic most capable of accessing and processing public information - that argument has lost traction.
After the data cleaning process is completed, organizers expect to determine how many responses registered as coming from abroad were actually submitted from within Cuba via VPN, which would shift the domestic-diaspora ratio further toward the island.
The Regime's Response and What It Signals
The state's reaction was swift and revealing. Razones de Cuba, a site with documented links to Cuba's State Security apparatus, labeled the survey a "statistical fraud" and a "propaganda setup" - and did so before any preliminary results had even been published. The preemptive condemnation is consistent with a pattern: when the Cuban government cannot control the data, it attacks the method.
Journalist Mónica Baró identified the contradiction plainly: "This survey has been blocked in Cuba because the regime is uninterested in knowing what the population thinks." The blockade, in this reading, is not a technical precaution but a political statement - an acknowledgment that the results, whatever their methodological limitations, are threatening enough to suppress.
Nieves placed the survey within a broader political moment. Since the start of 2025, and particularly as pressure from the Trump administration on Havana has intensified, he argues that the Cuban political landscape has shifted - that for the first time in a long while, a meaningful number of people on the island are reconsidering the possibility of real change. Whether that opening proves durable depends on forces far larger than any single survey.
The Civic Significance of Participation Under Pressure
Independent Cuban journalism has operated under extraordinary constraint for years. Outlets like CiberCuba and elTOQUE function largely from abroad or in conditions of persistent legal and physical risk for their contributors on the island. The coordination of more than 20 such outlets around a single civic project is, structurally, an unusual event - a demonstration that fragmented exile and diaspora media can act collectively when the purpose is clear enough.
Nieves described the level of participation as "a significant civic gesture" and "an act of liberation" - language that frames the survey less as a data collection exercise and more as a form of public expression in a context where public expression carries personal cost. That framing matters. The survey's value is not exhausted by its statistical limitations. It documents, in real time, that a demand for systemic change exists, is widely held among those able to voice it, and is sufficiently felt to motivate thousands of people to circumvent state censorship in order to register their opinion.
Final results, following data cleaning, are expected after the survey closes on the night of May 1.
