Cuban Government Plans Major Overhaul of ID Cards: Aims to Record Voice, Iris, and Additional Data

This month, the Cuban regime introduced a legislative proposal to the National Assembly of People's Power that seeks to consolidate birth records, residence details, and biometric data of all Cuban citizens and foreign residents in Cuba into a single system. This system would be tightly controlled by the Ministry of the Interior (MININT).

The proposal, signed by Juan Esteban Lazo Hernández, president of the National Assembly, is titled "On the System of Personal Identity and Residence." It aims to replace the 2007 Decree-Law 248, which the proposal itself acknowledges as outdated in relation to current constitutional principles.

According to the draft, personal identity is defined as "the harmonious integration of the birth registry information of Cuban citizens... with biometric data that uniquely and irreproducibly individualizes them, expressed both physically and digitally."

Biometric data are described in the legislation as "the set of unique physical characteristics of each natural person subject to this Law, enabling their indisputable identification through scientific and technological procedures."

The entire system would be managed by the Directorate of Identification, Migration, Alien Status, and Citizenship (DIMEC) under MININT, which "directs, implements, and oversees" the registration, digital, and biometric procedures, as outlined in Article Three of the proposal.

This unified system would include the Personal Identity and Residence Authority, the Personal Identity and Residence Register, the Foreign and Migration Register, the identification process, the personal identity and residence service, and the Bodies of Identity, Registers, and Residence and of Alien Status.

Regarding residence, the proposal mandates that Cuban citizens "are obligated to keep their residence registration updated" with the state authority. This is 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 establish a citizen's residence, the authority will consider "physical presence in the location and evidence of their intention to establish stable living conditions," a formulation that grants the state considerable discretion to validate or question where a person lives.

The scope of the law is extraordinarily broad, applying to Cuban citizens, resident foreigners, state organs, businesses, self-employed workers, cooperatives, political and mass organizations, and Cuban diplomatic representations abroad.

This proposal does not emerge in a vacuum. The MININT already operates prior biometric systems—the National Single Identification System (SUIN) and the Identity and Citizen Procedures System (NIS)—and the government platform Soberanía.gob.cu requires biometric validation through the MiIdentidad app, which confirms identity by scanning faces and ID card images.

The new law would formally legislate what has so far been operated through decrees and administrative resolutions, consolidating the three pillars of population control: registry identity, biometrics, and residence under one regulation.

The context in which this legislation is being pushed is telling: in August 2025, an elderly man from Santiago died in front of a MININT office while attempting to renew his ID card, highlighting the dire conditions of the current system that the regime now seeks to modernize and expand.

Historically, the MININT, which reportedly operates with around 36,000 agents, has used the identification system to monitor dissidents and control population movements, making this data concentration an unprecedented surveillance tool on the island.