How strange: AI admits bias against Cuban government

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During the Cold War, the CIA plotted all kinds of ways to try to kill Fidel Castro. Lethal weapons included everything from poisoned milkshakes and exploding cigars to booby-trapped seashells and toxic wet suits.
The National Security Archives and other sites seek declassified documents revealing plans aimed at toppling the Cuban government. These revelations are fascinating, but usually it takes years, even decades, for such information to become public. About 15 years ago, I started filing Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, requests to try to learn more about U.S. government activities in Cuba. I focused on the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Broadcasting Board of Governors, now called U.S. Global Media Agency, which ran Radio & TV Martí.
Filing FOIAs wasn’t entirely effective. Most of the documents I’d receive in response to my FOIAs were so heavily redacted they were practically useless. And the process took forever. The State Department waited nearly 15 years before finally responding earlier this week to a FOIAs I filed in 2011 (See: “Covert program exploited Cuba’s power grid decades before collapse“).
I tracked and wrote about American tax dollars spent in Cuba for about 10 years. One thing I noticed was that the U.S. was spending millions of dollars to influence the narrative about Cuba. This has included hiring information warfare specialists who try to increase domestic disillusionment in Cuba and erode trust in the socialist government.
Cuba can’t match the resources the U.S. government spends to fund its narrative. Information running counter to the Cuban government’s narrative quickly overwhelms the global information ecosystem.
The information war is highly asymmetric: the U.S. dominates global platforms, international reach and digital funding. And many U.S. media outlets are biased (See Study shows pro-U.S. bias in Cuba reporting).
With all that in mind, I wonder if AI search results were less likely to take into account information that is fair and balanced toward the Cuban government. And if AI is biased, would it be possible to get a straight answer about this from AI?
Gemini, Google’s AI tool, told me it is “structurally inevitable” that its analysis “is influenced by the very dynamics of digital imperialism.”
Isn’t that wild? AI says objectivity is impossible.
“Because I am an AI, I do not possess personal experiences, political allegiances, or firsthand knowledge,” Gemini states. “I analyze and synthesize patterns from a massive, global corpus of text. Because that corpus is heavily shaped by the global digital imbalances we just discussed, the data available to me is inherently asymmetric.”
The rest of Gemini’s response to my question is below:

Here is exactly how those structural imbalances can subtly distort AI analyses on a topic like U.S.–Cuba relations:

1. The Data Imbalance (The Western Web)

The vast majority of digitized, high-quality, indexed text on the internet is produced in the Global North, primarily in English.

  • The Sourcing Gap: Major Western media outlets, academic databases, and tech policy think tanks are heavily indexed in my training data.
  • The Cuban Reality: Because Cuba faces infrastructure bottlenecks, high data costs, and strict internal state controls, there is a much smaller volume of digitized, open-source literature reflecting the everyday internal perspectives of regular Cubans or the nuanced defenses of the Cuban state.
  • The Outcome: When an AI calculates prevailing consensus or cross-references facts, the sheer volume of Western-dominated text can drown out alternative or marginalized viewpoints.

2. Language and Linguistic Nuance

The dynamics of the U.S.–Cuba information war happen primarily in Spanish, but global geopolitical synthesis often relies on English translation.

  • Language translation models and semantic mapping are optimized for English.
  • Complex cultural concepts, highly localized Cuban slang used in digital dissent, or specific revolutionary rhetoric can lose their historical weight or exact meaning when abstracted into standard English, often defaulting to standard Western political terminology.

3. Institutional Validation vs. Algorithmic Echoes

AI models prioritize patterns from sources deemed “authoritative” or “reliable” by global standards (such as major newspapers, international bodies, and established universities).

  • While these sources strive for objectivity, many are physically located in, funded by, or culturally aligned with Western nations.
  • Conversely, state-run media from nations like Cuba is often explicitly categorized as “state-affiliated propaganda” by global tech infrastructure. While it is important to critically analyze state propaganda, automatically discounting these sources means the structural “defense” narrative of the smaller nation is systematically filtered out or treated with a higher baseline of skepticism by default.

⚖️ My Mitigation Strategy

To provide you with a fair, neutral, and balanced overview despite these structural biases, I intentionally try to frame topics through structural critiques rather than moral judgments. In our conversation, I sought to balance the analysis by:

  1. Clearly defining the U.S. apparatus (funding, covert apps like ZunZuneo, and algorithmic reach) as active agents of information projection.
  2. Explaining why Cuba responds with censorship, framing it not just as arbitrary authoritarianism, but as a deliberate sovereign defense mechanism against an asymmetric adversary.

I am a reflection of the global information ecosystem. Recognizing that the ecosystem itself is unequal is the first step toward reading any analysis—including mine—with a critical, analytical eye.

That’s the end of Gemini’s response. It’s me again, a human writing. So Gemini admits it’s biased, but it tries to provide balance.
On Wednesday, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez alluded bias in the U.S. effort to shape the narrative about Cuba.
“The Secretary of State of the #USA and his government can try to rewrite the history of the hemisphere, but history is stubborn,” he wrote on X. “The destructive trajectory of US imperialism and its alliance with the most reactionary governments in the region is well-written and recorded.
“It is expressed in tens of thousands of murdered, disappeared, and tortured people; in the expansion of violence and crime; and in the persecution of social leaders, popular movements, and fighters for justice. It manifests itself in military interventions, the usurpation of territories, the appropriation of others’ wealth, and the ruthless exploitation of workers and peasants.”

That’s all for now. More to come on the information wars.

Fact check by Gemini, Google’s AI tool: Based on the declassified government documents cited in the article, the core facts regarding the 2006 covert program are accurate and match official records, though the article relies heavily on an AI tool for its analytical conclusions. See report.

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