Cuban Manuel López Harrison presented on Thursday in Guantánamo a petition addressed to ETECSA's executive president, Tania Velázquez, demanding the annulment of the price hike imposed by the regime through faits accomplis.
The submitted document requests the nullification of the new tariffs and commercial measures implemented as of May 30, 2025. As explained, these were announced by Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz and affect access to mobile services and the Internet, including limits on national recharges and new conditions for acquiring data plans.
López Harrison argues that these actions are based on the constitutional right to file complaints and petitions, as well as what is established in Law No. 167 and Decree No. 124, which reserves the approval of maximum Internet access rates for the Minister of Communications —not the Prime Minister—. In fact, the Ministry of Communications should have sent the proposal to the Ministry of Finance and Prices for it to be published in the Official Gazette of the Republic, but neither was done, according to the president of ETECSA, to avoid causing anxiety.
In the case of Decree 124, it refers to the Cuban Civil Code, which stipulates that acts carried out without complying with administrative formalities are null and void.
The complaint explains that the implementation of the measures without prior notice violates the Prepaid Cellular Service Contract, which requires notification 30 days in advance. In this sense, it also denounces the illegality and unconstitutionality of the procedure, which was not published through a ministerial resolution in the Official Gazette, and recalls that both the Cuban Civil Code and the principle of socialist legality assert that acts performed without fulfilling the established legal requirements are null and void. Finally, it demands the retroactivity of the rates prior to May 30, 2025, as a measure to restore consumer rights and the violated legality.
López Harrison has initiated the process to test the seams of a political decision that violates the very laws of Cuba, crafted by the government itself, which bypasses them in order to collect foreign currency at the expense of the exile community, to whom it entrusts the survival of the telecommunications monopoly on the Island. The dollarization of ETECSA severely restricts top-ups in Cuban pesos, allowing only purchases of 360 pesos (less than a dollar), while offering packages in dollars to those who pay from abroad.
Harrison presented in Guantánamo, not without difficulties, a document drafted by the prestigious lawyer Julio Alfredo Ferrer Tamayo, the man who in 2020 filed a complaint against the President Miguel Díaz-Canel for spreading epidemics, after he appeared on television, in the midst of the pandemic, without a mask during a political event, despite the fact that there was legislation in effect in Cuba imposing fines of 2,000 pesos on anyone who removed their mask in public places.
Ferrer is the same lawyer who sued regime spokesperson Humberto López for defaming the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, now associated with Harvard University, in an unprecedented act of character assassination sponsored by the television aligned with the Communist Party of Cuba.
In an interview with CiberCuba, Julio Ferrer explained how to file a claim with ETECSA and has provided the document to all Cubans who wish to exercise their right to contest the fare increase through the channels established by the regime.
It is important to remember that the imposition of the price hike through de facto measures has caused an uproar among Cuban university students who have protested because the new prices limit their access to information and affect their academic performance and competitiveness in a hyperconnected world. The political police have responded with harassment, interrogations, warning notices, and presence on campuses.
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