Social media has mobilized Cubans in the last two decades like never before. The demonstrations against socialism that took place on July 11 and 12, 2021 (known as 11J), originated from a call to action on a Facebook group.

In this environment, independent communicators and influencers are key to delivering different messages to potentially millions of people. In a closed system like the one that has existed in Castro’s Cuba, this breaks the information monopoly controlled by the Communist Party and its narrative about the island.

For civil society, it is exciting to have, for the first time, such powerful communication alternatives — both inside and outside the island. These alternatives allow for the instantaneous sharing of events, interactive discussion of different perspectives, and exposure of fellow citizens to currents of thought that the Left denounces — from free market principles to conservatism and Christianity.

Since the beginning of the 2020s, there has been a greater presence of influencers residing on the island in public discourse. Some were key in defending the freedoms of expression, conscience, and association, the right to life, or — during the Evangelical Civic Movement (MoCE) between 2018 and 2022 — institutions such as the family and marriage during the Castro regime’s push for gender ideology.

Accustomed to being politically incorrect in every sense (from rejecting woke culture to denouncing the consequences of the socialist system) and to living under pressure because of it, it is not surprising that today some of the most followed anti-Castro voices within Cuba come from among the members of the growing evangelical community.

Anna Bensi

At the end of 2025, another name shook social media: Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente (Anna Bensi), a 20-year-old Christian woman from Havana, who exposed the harsh daily life of Cubans through her social media: the power outages, the shortages, the low wages, and the loss of hope.

In October 2025, she posted her first viral video explaining the bureaucratic disaster of the Castro regime, which delayed her university degree for months. She then began posting videos on her YouTube channel (whose motto is “All for Him and through Him”), reflecting on the lack of freedom of expression and the claim that “education in Cuba is free.”

Benítez Silvente, who attended a Pentecostal church in Havana, told me in an interview for this article that she would never renounce her identity as a Christian in her videos. “In fact, what gave me the courage to raise my voice was Jesus.”

Her 83,000 followers on Facebook made her a dangerous name in the eyes of the State. Due to pressure on her employer, a non-state company in Old Havana, she was fired. But her voice has not stopped being heard.

Ernesto Ricardo Medina

El4tico (El Cuartico) began as a series of short videos, designed for social media and very popular on Facebook, with tens of thousands of followers on YouTube and more than 58,000 on Instagram. There, two young men in the city of Holguín publish political analysis content about Cuban and global reality.

One of them, Ernesto Ricardo Medina, attended a small house church since childhood. The pastor and those who gathered there were elderly people. Even today, he identifies himself as a Christian. “Being Christ-centered in what I do is my goal,” he recently told me. El4tico’s format is simple: one or more people stand in front of a camera in a dilapidated room, with a school blackboard in the background (where messages like “Only Christ Saves” frequently appear) and a fan whose head rotates but whose blades don’t work (perhaps a symbol of the country’s dysfunction), to speak in plain language about various topics of everyday Cuban reality.

The topics range from a call to the Castro regime’s repressors (“the security forces”) to attacks on social media accounts by ETECSA and freedom of expression, among others. Because of this, the members of El4tico have been summoned by the political police.

According to Medina, they started the project two years ago, in 2024, when he was trying to experiment with a camera. “One day I got home, and my mother-in-law recommended that I make math videos, because I have a degree in mathematics, but instead, I started doing something just to entertain myself, because I was broke. And by doing it, I learned to edit, through sheer persistence.” It’s a technically unsophisticated environment — rooster crows can be heard in the audio from the small room in Tico’s house. What matters most is the message broadcasted from the incisive and brief scripts.

“We try to give a voice to the voiceless. Sometimes what we say is obvious. It angers me that fear is the master in Cuba. Fear cannot be the master, the Lord is Jesus,” he affirmed. “Before, I put His name on the blackboard in the back, but now I put it on one that’s under a light bulb, permanently. We want to show that Jesus is the Light. It’s a reminder. Jesus is part of the production of the little room.”

A police raid and his arrest in early February sparked a huge wave of solidarity.

Iván Daniel Calás Navarro

Iván Daniel Calás Navarro was one of the pioneering YouTubers on the island (today with almost 10,000 subscribers). On the internet, overcoming the challenges of expensive and poor connectivity, he also garnered more than 13,000 followers on Facebook.

In 2017, at the age of 14, he gained an audience after interviewing figures from Hispanic Christian art and entertainment such as Manny Montes and Ingrid Rosario. Like a digital Renaissance artist, he handled the visual design, the research, and the creation of the final audiovisual product. He addressed topics relevant to Christian youth with ease, theology, and theatricality.

Between 2020 and 2021, Calás Navarro broadcast weekly Facebook Live streams commenting on problems for religious freedom in Cuba, such as the lack of recognition of conscientious objection, the lack of access to state media, or the fact that parents cannot choose their children’s education. He touched on taboo topics in socialism such as the right to life in short fiction films like “Decision.” He also produced “Cyanophobia,” about “an offended minority” by the color blue that “transforms society” with a “catastrophic” result. Was it referring to the national and global imposition of gender ideology?

The “fight against progressivism and the defense of the faith” distinguished him from other creators. Whether he made a video about the history of the church, an apologetic one about the existence of God, or one of social criticism, they would all lead to Jesus. His monologues contributed to adding a Christian, conservative perspective to the public debate, aligned with traditional Western values, a perspective absent from both state and non-state media outlets. But the regime was watching.

During his mandatory military service from 2022 to 2023, he was interrogated several times. He was then a youth leader at his local church and continued to expose the harsh reality of the island through other pursuits such as photography and design.

Calás Navarro was one of the leaders of the “Routes with a Purpose” initiative, which brought together dozens of teenagers and young people on bicycle rides to pray at different points in the capital for the country’s economic and spiritual crisis. And in 2022, he taught classes on the meaning of religious freedom. The church served as a center of civic education in the face of totalitarianism.

For this reason, in September 2023, he was summoned by the police. He was accompanied to the station by his family, leaders, friends, and fellow believers. His pastor, who had baptized and married him in 2021, left him at the door. After the interrogation, he acknowledged: “Yes, I fear for my life. But God is in control. God is stronger than the State Security Department. God is the King of Kings.” In the following months, he did not remain silent; he denounced the regime with increasing vehemence.