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The Cuban dictatorship presented this month to the National Assembly of People's Power a draft law that would unify under a single system the registration information of birth, residence, and biometric data of all Cuban citizens and foreign residents on the island, with absolute control by the Ministry of the Interior (MININT).
The text, signed by Juan Esteban Lazo Hernández, president of the National Assembly, is titled “On the Personal Identity and Address System” and aims to replace Decree Law 248 from 2007, which the project itself recognizes as outdated in relation to the current constitutional provisions.
The project defines personal identity as "the harmonious integration of the birth registration information of Cuban citizens... with the biometric information that uniquely and irretrievably individualizes them, expressed in both physical and digital forms."
Biometric data is defined in the provisions as "the set of unique physical characteristics of each individual subject to compliance with this Law, which allow for their unequivocal identification through scientific and technological procedures."
The entire system would be under the control of the Directorate of Identification, Migration, Foreign Affairs, and Citizenship (DIMEC) of MININT, which "directs, carries out, and controls" the registration, digital, and biometric procedures, as stated in Article three of the project.
The unified system would consist of the Personal and Address Identity Authority, the Personal and Address Identity Registry, the Foreigners and Immigration Registry, the identification process, the personal and address identity service, and the bodies of Identity, Registries, and Address, as well as Immigration.
Regarding residency, the project states that Cuban citizens have "the obligation to keep their residence registration updated" with the state authority, defined as "the main seat of a natural person, the center of their legal relations, the place where they habitually reside or intend to establish themselves."
To determine a citizen's residence, the authorities will consider as relevant conditions "the physical presence in the location and the evidence of their intention to establish stable living conditions," a formulation that grants the State wide discretion to validate or challenge where each person lives.
The scope of the regulation is extraordinarily broad: it applies to Cuban citizens, resident foreigners, state bodies, businesses, self-employed workers, cooperatives, political and mass organizations, and Cuban diplomatic representations abroad.
The project does not arise in a vacuum. The MININT already operates previous biometric systems — the Unified National Identification System (SUIN) and the Citizens' Identity and Procedures System (NIS) — and the government platform Soberanía.gob.cu requires biometric validation through the MiIdentidad application, which verifies identity by scanning the face and images from the identity card.
The new law would formally establish a legislative framework for what has so far operated through decrees and administrative resolutions, closing the loop by unifying the three pillars of population control—registration identity, biometrics, and residence—under a single norm.
The context in which this legislation is being promoted is striking: an elderly man from Santiago passed away in front of a MININT office in August 2025 while trying to renew his identity card, an incident that highlighted the poor conditions of the current system that the regime now seeks to modernize and expand.
The MININT, which is estimated to operate with around 36,000 agents, has historically used the identification system to monitor dissidents and control population movements, turning this concentration of data into an unprecedented surveillance tool on the island.
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